William Empson: Among the Mandarins, vol.1

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 not national 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.