william empson's seven types of ambiguity

In Seven Types, Empson wrote, “I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.” Empson’s seven types are briefly defined in the table of contents: “First-type ambiguities arise when a detail is effective in several ways at once … In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one. Perhaps most helpful to erstwhile readers of poetry is Empson’s first book-length work of criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity. In general usage, a word or reference is deemed ambiguous if it has more than one possible meaning.

John Gross of the New York Times Book Review relates, “An essentially positive critic, had the gift of being able to show you qualities in a work you would never have seen without him, and the even more important gift of enlarging your imagination, encouraging you to go on looking for yourself.” This new approach to poetry appreciation centered on the reader’s close attention to the properties of poetic language opened up a new field of literary criticism-a remarkable accomplishment, considering that Empson did so without proposing to alter previous methods of criticism neither did he revise the standards by which literature is traditionally judged, nor did he invent new ways to reclassify well-known works of literature, Hugh Kenner points out in Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature. Empson’s explanations of how meaning is carried in poetic language have made poetry accessible to hundreds of readers, Kenner observes. 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.

William empson's seven types of ambiguity