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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
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William Empson, Volume I - Among the Mandarins (Paperback)
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William Empson, Volume I - Among the Mandarins (Paperback)
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William Empson was the foremost English literary critic of the
twentieth century. He was a man of huge energy and curiosity, and a
genuine eccentric who remained imperturbable in the face of all the
extraordinary circumstances in which he found himself. The
discovery of contraceptives in his possession by a bedmaker at
Cambridge University led to his being robbed of a promised
Fellowship. Yet Seven Types of Ambiguity, drafted while he was
still an undergraduate, promptly brought him world-wide fame.
Empson invented modern literary criticism in English. He acted too
as a cultural fifth-columnist, challenging received doctrine in
life and literature. "It is a very good thing for a poet to be
saying something which is considered very shocking at the time," he
maintained. "To become morally independent of one's formative
society ... is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is
the only means of moral progress."
His public life took him through many of the major political
events of the modern world -- the rise of imperialism in Japan, the
Sino-Japanese war in China, wartime propaganda for the BBC, and the
Chinese civil war and Communist takeover of Peking in 1949. His
friends and critical sparring partners included I. A. Richards,
Kathleen Raine, J. B. S. Haldane, Humphrey Jennings, George Orwell,
Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, Helen Gardner, and T.
S. Eliot.
"It is of great importance now that writers should try to keep a
certain world-mindedness," he insisted. "Without the literatures
you cannot have a sense of history, and history is like the
balancing-pole of the tightrope-walker ...; and nowadays we very
much need the longer balancing-pole of notnational but world
history." His passionate world-mindedness, and his humanism,
combativeness, and wit, are fully in evidence in this, the first of
two volumes exploring his remarkable life and work.
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