![]() ![]() The Times article relates that his first collection, Poems, “made an immediate deserved and explosive impact such as the literary scene in Britain knows only two or three times in a century.” Empson was also a legendary professor of English literature at Sheffield University, where he taught for nearly 20 years. Radically different from the romantic poetry produced by Dylan Thomas and Empson’s other peers, Empson’s poetry employed a more objective, nonsentimental language that reflected his competence as a mathematician and his reverence for science. Fraser remarks in Great Writers of the English Language: Poets. Empson will also be remembered for “the peculiar, utterly original and startling tenor of his works,” says the Times writer. The school of literary criticism known as New Criticism gained important support from Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects on English Verse. This work, together with his other published essays, has become “part of the furniture of any good English or American critic’s mind,” G.S. Poet, scholar, and critic Sir William Empson, was a massive literary figure of his time, one who “revolutionized our ways of reading a poem,” in the words of the London Times. ![]()
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