35 Facts About William Empson

Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism.

William Empson was the son of Arthur Reginald William Empson of Yokefleet Hall, Yorkshire.

William Empson's mother was Laura, daughter of Richard Mickelthwait, JP, of Ardsley House, Yorkshire.

William Empson was a first cousin of the twins David and Richard Atcherley.

William Empson first discovered his great skill and interest in mathematics at his preparatory school.

William Empson won an entrance scholarship to Winchester College, where he excelled as a student and received what he later described as "a ripping education" in spite of the rather rough and abusive milieu of the school: a longstanding tradition of physical force, especially among the students, figured prominently in life at such schools.

In 1925 William Empson won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, gaining a first for his Part I but a disappointing upper-second for his Part II.

William Empson then went on to pursue a second degree in English, and at the end of the first year he was offered a Bye Fellowship.

William Empson's supervisor in mathematics, Arthur Stanley Ramsey, expressed regret at Empson's decision to pursue English rather than mathematics, since it was a discipline for which Empson showed great talent.

William Empson returned to England in the mid-1930s only to depart again after receiving a three-year contract to teach at Peking University.

William Empson joined the exodus of the university's staff, with little more than a typewriter and a suitcase, and ended up in Kunming in China, with Lianda, the school created there by students and professors who were refugees from the war in the North.

William Empson worked for a year on the daily digest of foreign broadcasts and in 1941 met George Orwell, at that time the Indian editor of the BBC Eastern Service, on a six-week course at what was called the Liars' School of the BBC.

William Empson taught at Peking University, befriending a young David Hawkes, who later became a noted sinologist and chair of Chinese at Oxford University.

In 1953 William Empson was professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London, for a year.

William Empson then became head of the English Department at the University of Sheffield until his retirement in 1972.

In 1974 William Empson accepted an offer of distinguished professorship at York University in Toronto.

William Empson was knighted in 1979, the same year his old college, Magdalene, awarded him an honorary fellowship some 50 years after his expulsion.

William Empson was a significant scholar of Milton, Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama.

William Empson published a monograph, Faustus and the Censor, on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

William Empson was an important scholar of the metaphysical poets John Donne and Andrew Marvell.

Occasionally Empson brought his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as well as the poems of W B Yeats and T S Eliot, and Joyce's Ulysses.

William Empson was styled a "critic of genius" by Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying wilfully perverse readings of certain authors.

Harold Bloom has stated that William Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him because of their force and eccentricity.

William Empson's bluntness led to controversy both during his life and after his death, and a reputation in part as a "licensed buffoon".

William Empson is today best known for his literary criticism, and in particular his analysis of the use of language in poetical works: his own poems are arguably undervalued, although they were admired by and influenced English poets in the 1950s.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an acquaintance at Cambridge, but William Empson consistently denied any previous or direct influence on his work.

William Empson was very interested in the human or experiential reality to be discovered in great works of literature, as is manifest, for instance, in his discussion of the fortunes of the notion of proletarian literature in Some Versions of Pastoral.

William Empson goes on to deliver his political verdict with a psychological suggestion:.

William Empson made remarks reminiscent of Dr Samuel Johnson in their pained insistence:.

William Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem's badness in fact function in quite the opposite manner.

William Empson writes that it is precisely Milton's great sensitivity and faithfulness to the Scriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such a controversial picture of God.

William Empson reckons that it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, in the words of Blake, be of the Devil's party without knowing it:.

William Empson portrays Paradise Lost as the product of a poet of astonishingly powerful and imaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himself in the poem.

William Empson's poems are clever, learned, dry, aethereal and technically virtuosic, not wholly dissimilar to his critical work.

William Empson wrote very few poems and stopped publishing poems almost entirely after 1940.