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Empson, Sir William
(redirected from William Empson)

   Also found in: Wikipedia 0.04 sec.

Empson, Sir William

(born Sept. 27, 1906, Hawdon, Yorkshire, Eng.—died April 15, 1984, London) British poet and critic. He studied at Cambridge and later taught in Japan and China. His precocious Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which suggests that uncertainty or overlap of meanings in the use of a word can be an enrichment of poetry rather than a fault, had an immense influence on 20th-century criticism; its close examination of poetic texts helped lay the foundation for New Criticism. Later works include Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and The Structure of Complex Words (1951).



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The arrival of the first volume of John Haffenden's exhaustive and authoritative biography of poet and literary scholar William Empson, then, is timely.
I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube: I always had about me my Edmund Wilson--or my William Empson.
William Empson, with his focus on multivalent meanings, is cited by several of the contributors, and there are mentions of some of the earlier "greats," such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, who brought the European humanistic tradition to bear on the close examination of literary styles, making them windows on the cultures that produced them.
 
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