The Critic’s Not for Burning

Mr. Empson, now a bearded doyen of literary appreciation, has behind him a prolonged youth as Playboy of the Western World. Seven Types of Ambiguity, disorderly, perversely ingenious, vastly suggestive, was spun off—the central third of it—in a couple of weeks by a Cambridge undergraduate beneath the astonished eye of I.A. Richards, and in the 32 years since it was published no one has really had the heart to remonstrate with its abounding inaccuracies of fact and quotation.

Since the book works by microscopic examination of small poetic specimens, one would expect erroneous data to vitiate it. In fact, Empson doesn’t care whether he is examining the text or his own misremembering of the text, for the same reason Freud didn’t care that there stood between him and the dream itself the patient’s waking reconstruction of it. The reconstruction, Freud held, was simply a continuation of the process by which the dream itself had been generated. The misremembering, Empson seems to hold, is merely a continuation of the process by which the mind shapes and appropriates a poem it has read, a process for which the mere words are the barest initial hints.

HK

About the Author

Hugh Kenner

Mr. Empson, now a bearded doyen of literary appreciation, has behind him a prolonged youth as Playboy of the Western World. Seven Types of Ambiguity, disorderly, perversely ingenious, vastly suggestive, was spun off—the central third of it—in a couple of weeks by a Cambridge undergraduate beneath the astonished eye of I.A. Richards, and in the 32 years since it was published no one has really had the heart to remonstrate with its abounding inaccuracies of fact and quotation.

Since the book works by microscopic examination of small poetic specimens, one would expect erroneous data to vitiate it. In fact, Empson doesn’t care whether he is examining the text or his own misremembering of the text, for the same reason Freud didn’t care that there stood between him and the dream itself the patient’s waking reconstruction of it. The reconstruction, Freud held, was simply a continuation of the process by which the dream itself had been generated. The misremembering, Empson seems to hold, is merely a continuation of the process by which the mind shapes and appropriates a poem it has read, a process for which the mere words are the barest initial hints.