Using biography

by William Empson

Written in Empson's typically witty and iconoclastic style, Using Biography is a brilliant exploration of writers as diverse as Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce. The last book he completed before his death in 1984, it is his most recent since Milton's God was published in 1961. Empson's earlier books inspired American New Criticism, but unlike the New Critics Empson has always been an intentionalist. Using Biography is dramatic evidence of his fiercely held view that biographical material can help us appreciate a writer's methods and intentions. It demonstrates a shrewd understanding of human relationships as they occur, not always explicitly, in works of literature.

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

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

[Cyprien Saito]

When I read this book for the first time, I felt it a kind of the manner of happy ending expression.