I remember to have wept with a sense of the unnecessary -- William Empson

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1880) I remember to have wept with a sense of the unnecessary I remember to have wept with a sense of the unnecessary. 'Do you think me so ungenerous that I need to be deceived about this? Do you think me such a fool that these tactics will deceive me?' Now, on the contrary, I shall speak with reverence of liars. What you must save for is the Golden Bowl, Cast anthropoid, beaten to delicacy; One depends on that, though hollow, upon industrialism, Upon milkwhite metal, upon furnaces all night. Having got the thing one may fill it when required, at leisure, From any river, from the common tap; Those cloud-pipes being frozen, with marine tears; And there will always be flowers to stick into it in the springtime. Lies would be more serious if one could lie about the matter in hand; But it is an impertinence to think oneself so penetrating. What people tell you by lies is how they would deal with this if it was true, What they would like to make you think about this, The fact that they think this worth repeating or inventing, Or the fact that they will endeavour to make this true, And, whether the external circumstances are favourable to them or not, These are important truths, and you have been told them. People who feel that lies make life intolerable, That it is madness to attempt living, since people are liars, Are like people who look at the handbook before the picture, Are like people who wish the words of a poem to have a single meaning, Are unable to feel safe unless they are irrelevantly informed. Lies are the discipline of knowing that people are not you. It is licentious not to lie to a friend. The belief in truth leads to many untrue beliefs. It leads to the belief that a series of earnest statements make a poem. If one could speak the whole truth about lies one would be contradicting oneself. Do you think me so ungenerous that I need to be deceived about this? Do you think me such a fool that these tactics will deceive me? -- William Empson

Such a delightful, roguish poem this. Both hilariously tongue in cheek
and fiendishly logical. I love the sly 'poetry' digs ("It leads to the
belief that a series of earnest statements make a poem") and some of the
lines are spectacular by themselves ("Lies are the discipline of knowing
that people are not you."). But I also love the central argument - that
you can infer much from the nature and direction of deception (game
theory anyone?) and that there is little purpose to learning a bunch of
meaningless facts, just to be well-informed ("unable to feel safe unless
they are irrelevantly informed").

Aseem.

Just a Smack at Auden -- William Empson

(Poem #1311) Just a Smack at Auden Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. What is there to be or do? What's become of me or you? Are we kind or are we true? Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end. Shall I build a tower, boys, knowing it will rend Crack upon the hour, boys, waiting for the end? Shall I pluck a flower, boys, shall I save or spend? All turns sour, boys, waiting for the end. Shall I send a wire, boys? Where is there to send? All are under fire, boys, waiting for the end. Shall I turn a sire, boys? Shall I choose a friend? The fat is in the pyre, boys, waiting for the end. Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end? Shall we send a cable, boys, accurately penned, Knowing we are able, boys, waiting for the end, Via the Tower of Babel, boys? Christ will not ascend. He's hiding in his stable, boys, waiting for the end. Shall we blow a bubble, boys, glittering to distend, Hiding from our trouble, boys, waiting for the end? When you build on rubble, boys, Nature will append Double and re-double, boys, waiting for the end. Shall we make a tale, boys, that things are sure to mend, Playing bluff and hale, boys, waiting for the end? It will be born stale, boys, stinking to offend, Dying ere it fail, boys, waiting for the end. Shall we go all wild, boys, waste and make them lend, Playing at the child, boys, waiting for the end? It has all been filed, boys, history has a trend, Each of us enisled, boys, waiting for the end. What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend? No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end. Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend, Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end. Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. Not a chance of blend, boys, things have got to tend. Think of those who vend, boys, think of how we wend, Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. -- William Empson

While I enjoy Auden's poetry very much [1], I can't deny that he's very
easy to criticize. His poems often seem too glib, too easy; there's
always the nagging feeling that behind the perfect construction and
beguiling rhythms there's (whisper it!) not a lot of depth. The Emperor,
we suspect, has no clothes.

The Empson, on the other hand, is usually so swaddled in robes of
learning and sophistication that he's lost to the general view. His
poetry is erudite, complex, and subtle. While he can -- and often does
-- exhibit the same command of prosody that characterizes Auden, he
equally often chooses to build dense layers of meaning into his every
word, until his poems become puzzles for the reader and the critic to
solve. They're nowhere near as accessible as Auden's finest works;
indeed, they don't even try to be.

It's no surprise, then, that Auden was the most popular poet of the 20th
century, while Empson remains obscure and cultish. Did it rankle? I'm
not sure. Empson was certainly idealistic enough not to care overmuch
about the comparison, but there are times (especially when reading
today's poem) when one senses a definite hint of "I can do everything
Auden does, but I choose not to" in his work. It's the classic
opposition of depth and width: Empson champions the former quality, but
acknowledges (even while parodying it) the power of the latter.

All analysis apart, I do love the way today's poem skewers Auden's
style. It's all there: the use of a refrain, the slightly condescending
tone allied with indecisiveness and moral drift, the repetition which
seems poised at any moment to descend into gibberish, the sheer
_banality_ of it all. Beautiful, simply beautiful.

thomas.

[1] It was not always thus. See the commentary to Poem #677.

[On Empson and the Cambridge poets]

.. [the] Elizabethan-Metaphysical fashion naturally dominated the next
period of 'Cambridge poetry' and marked it off sharply, at any rate in
style, from the Georgians. Its most characteristic writer was beyond any
doubt William Empson. His poetry has even less of the superficial local
colouring than that of Brooke ... But in all other ways he seemed, at
the time (and in retrospect too) to be exactly and admirably the
expression of the time, as well as being almost violently himself. The
literary atmosphere was set chiefly by I.A. Richards, whose lectures on
practical criticism were drawing vast, almost evangelical audiences and
educating them in the reading of 'difficult' poetry, in the
understanding of images in which intellectual and emotive elements were
fused. Empson was able to give this fashion a creative turn, partly
because he just happened to be able to do it, but partly, perhaps,
because he had read mathematics (very creditably) before he took the
English Tripos. 'Long words' and scientific notions that others had to
garner carefully and consciously for their images to him came entirely
naturally: they were familiar to him not merely because he wanted to use
them in poetry - he used them because they were already familiar. And
the impact of his poetry was strengthened by his criticism, for
preliminary studies of the book that later came out as Seven Types of
Ambiguity were being published in the same magazines that published his
poetry. Taken together, they established a powerful and coherent, if
limited, literary position.

So much was clear on the surface. But there were deeper resonances with
the spirit of the place and age that escaped notice, because he himself
played them down, partly from what looked like a fastidious sense of
intellectual privacy, partly through a habit of irony often carried to
the point of mannerism. But he was, after all, President of the
Heretics, the Cambridge society that most obviously embodied the
radical-rationalist tradition of the pre-war days. By training and
intellectual capacity, moreover, he was aware, in a much less dilettante
manner than most of his contemporaries, of the fact that G.E. Moore and
Wittgenstein were lecturing in the University, as well as I.A. Richards.
So that both his poetry and his criticism, though almost deceptively
purely 'literary', moved in a real intellectual and moral world, clearly
grasped, even when the grasp was ironically concealed. The most obvious
outward sign of a serious concern for the conduct of life was his
capacity for mordant social observation, for pin-pointing the more
significant quirks and follies of human behaviour. And closely allied
with this was a superb command of colloquial English, so that among the
'difficult' lines and the scientific images there were astonishing
pieces of simply musical writing.

        -- Hugh Sykes Davis,
http://jacketmagazine.com/20/hsd-camb-po.html

[On today's poem]

A fine example of political double-talk is given in Just a Smack at
Auden, in which William Empson emulates the authoritarian tone of
Auden's The Orators. Empson's speaker addresses his listeners 'boys,'
and in spite of his autocratic tone, he asks 'the boys' numerous banal
questions that show speaker's indecision, for example: 'Shall I pluck a
flower, boys,/ Shall I save or spend?'[29] This aspect of the poem is
another textual reference, this time our scope of reading Just a Smack
at Auden is broadened by T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock, in which the speaker assumes an authoritarian tone by stating
at the beginning: 'Let us go then, you and I,'[30] and then asks his
reader a number of prosaic questions that resemble Empson's lyric even
in the regularity of the rhythmic, iambic verse. As he says for example:
'Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?'[31] Both poems
stress the inability of a self to make a decision, or judge reasonably
in the modern society; notwithstanding whether one is a leader or a
commonplace man like Alfred Prufrock, they are exiles in a society that
lacks domesticity.

        -- Marek Helman, http://maras5.tripod.com/

Villanelle -- William Empson

(Poem #706) Villanelle It is the pain, it is the pain endures. Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. What later purge from this deep toxin cures? What kindness now could the old salve renew? It is the pain, it is the pain endures. The infection slept (custom or changes inures) And when pain's secondary phase was due Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. How safe I felt, whom memory assures, Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew. It is the pain, it is the pain endures. My stare drank deep beauty that still allures. My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. You are still kind whom the same shape immures. Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue. It is the pain, it is the pain endures. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. -- William Empson

1935.

Empson's blend of emotion and intellect is very reminiscent of John Donne,
and like Donne, his poems, though dense and impenetrable at first, reward
the reader willing to explore their intricacies. Today's poem is as
metaphysical as they come: the central conceit [1] is reinforced and given
depth by the precise use of terminology [2], yet not so much as to detract
from the essentially human feeling that gives rise to it. The choice of form
is equally inspired - the strict constraints of the villanelle, like Donne's
convoluted syntax, work to harness the flood of emotion that would otherwise
sweep the poet away. Wonderfully done.

thomas.

[1] "Better living through chemistry!"... errm... maybe not.
[2] chemic, purge, toxin, salve, infection, poison... a Physick's Delight of
jargon.

[Minstrels Links]

Poems by John Donne:
Poem #330, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
Poem #384, "Song"
Poem #403, "A Lame Beggar"
Poem #465, "The Sun Rising"

Poems by William Empson:
Poem #202, "Missing Dates"
Poem #233, "Let It Go"
Poem #351, "The Teasers"
"The Teasers" has an Empson biography attached; "Missing Dates" includes an
assessment of his contribution to twentieth-century poetry and criticism.

Villanelles:
Poem #38, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", Dylan Thomas
Poem #202, "Missing Dates", William Empson
Poem #393, "Villanelle (minimalist): One Drunken Night", Peter Schaeffer
Poem #639, "One Art", Elizabeth Bishop
Poem #677, "Villanelle", W. H. Auden

Poems that use the word 'chemic':
Poem #568, "Especially When The October Wind", Dylan Thomas

The Teasers -- William Empson

Abstraction of a different kind...

(Poem #351) The Teasers Not but they die, the teasers and the dreams, Not but they die, and tell the careful flood To give them what they clamour for and why. You could not fancy where they rip to blood You could not fancy nor that mud I have heard speak that will not cake or dry. Our claims to act appear so small to these Our claims to act colder lunacies That cheat the love, the moment, the small fact. Make no escape because they flash and die, Make no escape build up your love, Leave what you die for and be safe to die. -- William Empson

'It was this poem, analysed by John Wain in Penguin New Writing in 1950,
which gave rise to the Empson revival. The poem is a slight one compared
to some of Empson's other pieces in this vein, but it has a musical
quality and is able to make abstraction sound mysterious and sinister.
The central point of the poem is hard to fix on, but it may be about the
puncturing of illusions and the wastage of effort.'

        -- George Macbeth, Poetry 1900-1975.

Elsewhere, Macbeth makes the comment that to the ideal reader of Empson
should be well-versed in science, linguistics, anthropology and of
course the history of critical thought...

The obvious parallel, of course, is John Donne. Empson is every bit as
universal a thinker as Donne, complex and intellectual, yet at the same
time never aloof or uninvolved - his poems, like Donne's, reflect a
passionate commitment to life in all its aspects.

Empson also displays an almost frightening degree of moral integrity -
some would call it moral bloodymindedness - in his poems; his work may
be intentionally obscure at times, but blinkered it never is. As a
result, his (relatively small) output has aged a good deal better than
that of his contemporaries in the 1930s, who (it now seems to us) were
blind to many of the problems that beset their generation.

All told, Empson remains a fine poet - perhaps even a great one - but
he'll never be popular. Perhaps he would not be dissatisfied with such
an epitaph.

thomas.

[Minstrels Links]

'Missing Dates' is one of the two important villanelles to be written in
the twentieth century; I find it almost as powerful (in a very different
way, of course), as Dylan Thomas' magnificent 'Do Not Go Gentle Into
That Good Night'. The former is archived at poem #202 ; the latter at
poem #38 .

'Let It Go' is a sort of poetic apology for not writing more verse; you
can read it at poem #233

[Poetry 101 - Followup]

The contrast with Martin's equally abstract offering of yesterday
notwithstanding, my choice of poem was motivated by my choice of poet: I
wanted to run an Empson as a tribute. For Empson it was who first stated
the principles of poetic constructon (especially with respect to the use
of language to create a multiplicity of meaning) which are accepted as a
given by most critics today (and which formed the basis for my essay of
two days ago). After Empson's definitive study 'Seven Types of
Ambiguity', twentieth-century criticism would never be the same.

'Ambiguity - the use of words that allow alternative interpretations. In
factual, explanatory prose, ambiguity is considered an error in
reasoning or diction; in literary prose or poetry, it often functions to
increase the richness and subtlety of language and to imbue it with a
complexity that expands the literal meaning of the original statement.'

        -- EB

[Biography]

Empson, Sir William

  b. Sept. 27, 1906, Hawdon, Yorkshire, Eng.
  d. April 15, 1984, London

British poet and critic known for his immense influence on 20th-century
literary criticism and for his rational, metaphysical poetry.

Empson was educated at Winchester College and at Magdalene College,
Cambridge. He earned degrees in mathematics and in English literature,
which he studied under I.A. Richards. His first poems were published
during this time. Several of the verses published in Empson's Poems
(1935) also were written while he was an undergraduate and reflect his
knowledge of the sciences and technology, which he used as metaphors in
his largely pessimistic assessment of the human lot. Much influenced by
John Donne, the poems are personal, politically unconcerned (despite the
preoccupation with politics in the 1930s), elliptical, and difficult,
even though he provided some explanatory notes. Later collections of his
poetry included The Gathering Storm (1940) and Collected Poems (1949;
rev. ed. 1955).

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rev. ed. 1953), one of the most
influential critical works of the first half of the 20th century, was
essentially a close examination of poetic texts. Empson's special
contribution in this work was his suggestion that uncertainty or the
overlap of meanings in the use of a word could be an enrichment of
poetry rather than a fault, and his book abounds with examples. The book
helped lay the foundation for the influential critical school known as
the New Criticism. Empson applied his critical method to somewhat longer
texts in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and further elaborated it in
The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Empson's verbal analyses were
based on the view that poetry's emotive effect derives primarily from
the ambiguities and complexities of its cognitive and tonal meanings.

From 1931 to 1934 Empson taught English literature at the University of
Tokyo, and he subsequently joined the English faculty of Peking National
University in China. He was Chinese editor at the British Broadcasting
Corporation during World War II and returned to teach at Peking National
University from 1947 to 1952. Empson was professor of English literature
at Sheffield University from 1953, becoming emeritus in 1971. He was
knighted in 1979.

He was also a distinguished poet who influenced younger poets in the
1950s. His Poems appeared in 1935, The Gathering Storm in 1940, and his
Collected Poems in 1955. Empson's poetry is characterized by ingenious
conceits using a subject matter drawn from astrophysics, mathematics,
and other sciences.

        -- EB

Let It Go -- William Empson

(Poem #233) Let It Go It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange. The more things happen to you the more you can't Tell or remember even what they were. The contradictions cover such a range. The talk would talk and go so far aslant. You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there. -- William Empson

After a dazzling start [1], Empson's poetic career seemed to slow down in his
later years, as he concentrated on literary analysis [2]. Let It Go should
perhaps be interpreted in this light, as a sort of apology for not writing more
poetry. Beyond that, it's fairly self-explanatory (in marked contrast to much of
Empson's work), so I won't spend any more time boring you :-)

thomas.

[1] He was celebrated for his writing while still an undergraduate at Cambridge
(where he read Mathematics).
[2] In which field he earned a reputation as perhaps the most important critic
of the twentieth century; his only real challenger to the title is the young T.
S. Eliot. Empson's book Seven Types Of Ambiguity is probably the single most
influential work of criticism since, oh, I don't know, Bradley's Shakespearean
Tragedy (at the very least).

[Links]

Empson's villanelle Missing Dates can be read at poem #202
The commentary at this site includes an analysis of Empson's poetic style,
his philosophy and influence on other poets. Worth a dekko.

Missing Dates -- William Empson

(Poem #202) Missing Dates Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. It is not your system or clear sight that mills Down small to the consequence a life requires; Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills. The complete fire is death. From partial fires The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. It is the poems you have lost, the ills From missing dates, at which the heart expires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. -- William Empson

One of the two 'important' villanelles written in the twentieth century [1],
Missing Dates is fairly representative of William Empson's work as a whole:
dense, carefully constructed, honest to the point of harshness, complex and
intellectual, almost frightening in its intelligence, but still passionate in
its adherence to truth. Many of the same adjectives could be used to describe
his character and his critical writings; indeed, his status as the foremost
literary critic of his time seems assured.

Which is not to say that he'll ever be a popular poet, or even a well-liked one.
Empson's poems, though not intentionally obscure in the manner of, say, Geoffrey
Hill's early work, nevertheless make the reader 'work' to understand them; his
astonishingly wide range of reference and allusion does not make the task any
easier. As a poet's poet and a critic's critic he ranks among the very best;
that's quite enough for me.

thomas.

[1] the other, of course, being Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good
Night, minstrels poem #38; you can read more about this wonderfully intricate
poetic form at poem #38

[Assessment]

Like Eliot before him and Donald Davie after him, Empson has an equal reputation
as a poet and a critic. The passionate intelligence of  his poetry has something
in common with the work of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, though
Empson is more perversely obscure than Donne ever was, and much less directly
concerned - on the surface at least - with his own experience. Empson has
himself spoken of the 'puzzle interest' of poetry, though one feels that this is
in part said with his tongue in his cheek for the sake of shocking readers out
of their preconceived ideas. Unlike Eliot's notes to The Waste Land, the notes
which Empson prints in the back of his Collected Poems are of considerable value
in elucidating the imagery and intention behind some of his poems.

In recent years Empson's reputation has come increasingly to depend on his
tough-minded and yet not uninvolved attitude to life, which has come to be felt
as a sort of moral touchstone. This may in part be due to his open opposititon
to established Christianity. It is certainly also due to his (as it now seems)
more perceptive attitude to the problems of the 1930s than the group of poets
who centred round Auden. Empson himself was teaching in the Far East in the late
1930s and saw more of the upheaval caused by war than poets who seemed to write
more directly about it in Europe. His work was a major influence on the
counter-revolutionary poetry of The Movement in the 1950s.

[Missing Dates] is one of Empson's most characteristic and powerful ones.
Whether one takes it mainly about politics, or mainly about private life, it
conveys a kind of doomed grandeur. Even the inversion in the first of the two
refrain lines seems unobtrusive in the context of the whole poem's even,
dignified delivery.

    -- George MacBeth

[Links]

There's an _excellent_ essay on critical reactions (over time) to Empson's
poetry and his (highly influential) critical theories at
[broken link] http://www.btinternet.com/~j1837c/jbc/empson.html
Strongly recommended.

[More Stuff]

For the significance of Empson's criticism is this: his criticism is an attempt
to deal with what the poem "means" in terms of its structure as a poem. To sense
its importance, one must recall what the critic in the past has attempted to do:
either he attempted to find the goodness of the poem (and its status as poetry)
in terms of its prose argument - and in terms of the "truth" of what was being
said - and thus made poetry compete with philosophy or science; or else he tried
to find the poetry in the charm of the decorative elements - in the metrical
pattern, in the sensuous imagery, etc.

    -- Cleanth Brooks

Ambiguity: A nonpejorative term for the capacity of language to sustain multiple
meanings. Also called plurisignation or polysemy, ambiguity arises from what
William Empson calls "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for
alternative reactions to the same piece of language." In literary parlance,
ambiguity is not a mistake in denotation to be avoided, but a resource of
connotation to be exploited. In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Empson argues
that the richness, complexity, and concentration of literary language derives
from the seven types of ambiguity he discusses. The notion that ambiguity is the
root condition of all literary discourse, a notion that arises from I. A.
Richards's distinction between the scientific (referential or denotative) and
the poetic (emotive or connotative) uses of language, is an integral aspect of
the New Critical view that irony, paradox, and tension are definitive aspects of
the work of art.

    -- Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown
Glossary of Literary Theory,
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/headerindex.html