Abstract
Sir William Empson was born in Yorkshire and educated at Winchester College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he turned to English studies from mathematics and wrote the first draft of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) while still a pupil of I. A. Richards (1893–1979). He held professorships in China and Japan, and was Professor of English at the University of Sheffield from 1953 to 1971. Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), The Structure of Complex Words (1951) and Milton’s God (1961) are, with Seven Types, among the most stimulating modern works of literary criticism. Empson’s verse, in Poems (1935), The Gathering Storm (1940) and Collected Poems (1955), is deliberately puzzling but worth the time and thought he expects of his readers.
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© 1989 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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McEwan, N. (1989). William Empson 1908–84. In: McEwan, N. (eds) The Twentieth Century (1900–present). Macmillan Anthologies of English Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20151-8_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20151-8_49
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-46477-9
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