Collected Poems

by William Empson

Fifty-six poems, including "Chinese Ballad" and "A Masque (The Birth of Steel)." "The wrung-out, colloquial dryness of this diction has its own firm music, capable of being heightened, in more elaborate poems, to a grand polyphony."-Robert Fitzgerald, New Republic.

Genres: Poetry

119 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.

He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics. Jonathan Bate has said that the three greatest English Literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".

Empson has been styled a "critic of genius" by Sir Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying willfully perverse readings of certain authors; and Harold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him, because of their force and eccentricity. Empson's bluntness led to controversy both during his life and after his death, and a reputation in part also as a "licensed buffoon" (Empson's own phrase).

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Goodreads doesn't seem to have the Hogarth Press edition I read which I mention only because I've somehow acquired a review copy and that amuses me anyway Empson is better known for being a bit of a sharp one in theoretical fields and he didn't write too much poetry.

His poetry is among the most frustrating I've ever encountered because all of it is so adjacent to being incredible and all of it is entirely let down by his addiction to couplets, perfect and alternating. The man hoists his petard. It's rugged, scraggly, crisp language that at times feels brilliantly contemporary which is then let down by the forced clang of a rhyme. Now we know I'm not opposed to that on principle but it simply doesn't work here and I wish I could tell him to just let himself go a bit go wild no need to give us love and dove but thank you anyway William I won't say it's all lost

[Mark Bellerophon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empson is not very well-known for his poetry which is a shame as he produced a very intellectual--somewhat strange--poems. I wish I could have understood them better myself as even his notes (at the end of the book) on his own poems seem only touch on his thinking process of the individual poems themselves. I highly recommend them for readers of Donne and Eliot who Empson himself admitted he was influenced by.

[Dominic H · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given a copy of the lovely Chatto 1956 second impression of Empson's Collected Poems for Christmas. It is a very slim volume and one quickly sees why. The best of these poems show some familiarity with what might be expected of someone writing poems in the 1920s and 30s, but there is nothing instinctive at all. Empson apparently had no ear for his own poetry and - as the current parlance goes - no access to any sort of poetic idiom he was comfortable with or had a gift for. He is left with the notion that all poems must rhyme, which one would like to say was the key to unlocking a muse but in reality adds an unintentional air of absurdity.

[Scarlett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really understand any of the poems. They sometimes had a line or two that I thought was really good then I'd be lost again.