A Study Of William Empson’s Poetics

William Empson was one of the most distinctive poet-critics among20th century and left a profound mark upon modern Anglo-American poetry and literary criticism. This dissertation investigates the core of his poetics—verbal analysis—which he developed across his three seminal works of criticism—Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and The Structure of Complex Words (1951). By means of three concepts "ambiguity","pastoral" and "complex word", he is aimed at demonstrating his usually original, often obscure, and frequently polemical critical performance. In essence, William Empson’s critical thought of verbal analysis is a device of explicating multiple meanings of literary texts, revealing the richness of literary effects, and displaying various angles of possible understanding.An introductory chapter explores how Empson owes much to I. A. Richard, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves and Sigmund Freud in the context of rapid and revolutionary developments of scientific, ideological, literary and cultural fields in the1920s. Following this introduction, Empson’s three important books of verbal analysis as the occasion for addressing a different aspect of literary-critical practice will be examined.Chapter Two draws attention to Empson’s analytical strategies in Seven Types of Ambiguity. He redefined the significance of ambiguity in poetry and explicated the seven types of it. With Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson becomes the first critic to treat ambiguity as a useful tool in the analysis of literary texts. In his view, the ambiguity of the poetry arises from the text, reader’s response and writer’s eonscious and unconscious intention. Empson displayed critical performance on ambiguity of poetry from linguistic and psychological points of view. The concept ambiguity is objectively enhanced to aesthetic level and is recognized as a core concept of modern literary criticism.Chapter Three reflects on the redefinition and explication of multiple meanings of pastoral genre. In Some Versions of Pastoral, he introduced a new way of understanding this traditional genre. It can be taken as a literary mode that criticizes the idea of social thought and hierarchical structure. His approach is demonstrated brilliantly in the seven essays, such as The Beggar s Opera and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland etc, in a broad context; they discuss topics of class and society, such as proletarian literature; and they employ insights from cultural anthropology and Freudian psychology. By analyzing the inner conflicts, any literary works can be regarded as a "pastoral process" of "putting the complex into the simple" and as a mode of criticizing and mitigating the social conflicts.Chapter Four considers the way how a simple word shows its complexity in the context of society and history. The simple words, such as "wit","dog","fool" etc, are the accumulation of various meanings following a historical order. Their ways of expressing meanings which are based on their logical structure, reveal the way of thinking prevailing at the time. The keyword analysis method which is designed to examine the same word which occurs repeatedly in different occasion, finds out the root of word’s complexity. The meanings of words gradually expanded and changed with the historical movements. Thus, it becomes a microcosm of society and history.Finally, Chapter Five differentiates Empson from the New Critics by the viewpoints on form and author’s intention. Besides, he goes beyond the limits of formalism and predicts the forthcoming postmodern literary criticism, especially the theory of deconstructurism.Empson’s literary criticism of verbal analysis gradually moves from linguistic and psychological context into sociological and historical context. It defends the richness and complexity of literary works and also distinguishes itself from any modern and postmodern literary critical theory. His uniqueness owes much to his experience in the Far East. It provides him an irreplaceable oriental point of view. Humane, resourceful, judicious, he exemplified in his life and work the’world-mindedness’he believed all readers of literature should strive to attain.