10
Between Riding’s protests that he failed to acknowledge her influence on Seven Types of Ambiguity and their lengthy, angry, and inconclusive correspondence on this topic in 1970 and 1971, Empson revised the book for the publication of a second edition. Should the reference to A Survey of Modernist Poetry remain, supplemented by the correct attribution of authorship to both Riding and Graves (as on the erratum slip)? Or should the original acknowledgment of Graves as the sole source of his method stand, with the reference to A Survey of Modernist Poetry quietly dropped? Addressing these questions involved reflecting on whether he found the real source of his inspiration to have been the work by Graves in collaboration with Riding that he originally mentioned, or the early work by Graves preceding Riding’s influence upon him, work Empson had not mentioned.
The revised preface to Seven Types of Ambiguity includes a reference to Graves’s conflict theory. Empson had originally mentioned the conflict theory – without attributing it to Graves – only in the main text of the first edition; by foregrounding it in this fashion, he makes it clear that he still considers Graves to have been the chief influence upon him. Moreover, he removes any reference to A Survey of Modernist Poetry from the second edition of the book, effectively dismissing Riding’s belief that she also deserved acknowledgment.
Yet Empson also declines to replace his reference to the famous book by Riding and Graves with a reference to any particular work by Graves as the source of the method in question. So his acknowledgment of influence becomes simultaneously more accurate in one way and less precise in another. Perhaps just as interesting, however, is the fact that the new preface finds new ways to affirm both Graves’s original influence on Empson’s method in the late 1920s and his continuing relevance to Empson’s thinking about the nature of poetic language in 1947. It turns out that Graves was still a lively presence in Empson’s thinking about literature twenty years after his first encounter with his work.
•
In the following passage from the 1947 preface, for instance, Empson alludes both to Graves’s assumption that mental conflict underlies all poetry and to Graves’s experience of shell-shock following the Great War: “I want now to express my regret that the topical interest of Freud distracted me from giving adequate representation in the seventh chapter to the poetry of straightforward mental conflict … I believe that rather little good poetry has been written in recent years, and that … the effort of writing a good bit of verse has in almost every case been carried through almost as a clinical thing; it was done only to save the man’s own sanity. Exceedingly good verse has been written under these conditions in earlier centuries as well as our own, but only to externalise the conflict of an individual. It would not have been sensible to do such hard work unless the man himself needed it.”1 However much Empson regrets the implication that he allowed in the first edition that some examples of the seventh type of ambiguity were rooted in Freudian “neurotic disunion,” his vocabulary here – his talk of “mental conflict,” of poetry as “a clinical thing,” as something done because the poet “needed it” (done “to save a man’s sanity,” to “externalise the conflict of an individual”) – remains determinedly psychological and shows that he still accepts Graves’s conflict theory. Furthermore, he affirms that conflict theory remains the basis for the work on ambiguity in contemporary poetry that he imagines that he might have done but, he confesses, “if I tried to rewrite the seventh chapter to take in contemporary poetry I should only be writing another book.”2
Empson presumably has Graves’s work in mind when he refers to contemporary verse “carried through almost as a clinical thing … done only to save the man’s sanity.”3 In On English Poetry, Graves says that “poetry … is a form of psycho-therapy.”4 In The Meaning of Dreams, he says that his 1921 poem “The Gnat” “has many attributes that connect it with a war-neurosis” and so explains its therapeutic function: “I can say now definitely that I understand what the whole conflict was about. I was at the time suffering badly from so-called shell-shock, the result of prolonged trench service, wounds and a fear that war might break out all over again. Nineteen hundred and twenty-one was a very anxious year, there being wars and rumours of wars in Russia, Ireland, the Near East and elsewhere, and my nervous condition got worse. I did not at the time realise that the fear of war was giving me all this trouble.”5 In Poetic Unreason, he explains revisions to one of his poems between 1918 and 1921 as having a therapeutic function because during this time he was “deeply interested in Freudian psycho-analysis as being a possible corrective for [his] shell-shock,” and he even suggests that his approach to the criticism of poems has a therapeutic function: “I have been led to take an interest in this analysis business … partly to find relief from a war neurosis from which I still officially suffer.”6 Certainly when his correspondence with Riding in the 1970s prompted Empson to reconsider yet again Graves’s influence upon him, he recalled the connection between his mentor’s literary theory and shell-shock: “It all began with shell-shock from the First War, of course … He had developed a Conflict Theory of poetry, soon after the war, and went on to consider the verbal means by which conflict finds expression.”7
Yet however much Empson is thinking of Graves’s post-war, post-traumatic poetry here, it is clear that he has “conflict theory” in mind once more as he writes his 1947 preface. In fact, Empson’s paragraph about how “the impact of Freud” “distracted” him from properly discussing “poetry of straightforward mental conflict” reprises the main features of Graves’s first chapter in Poetic Unreason – more than twenty years after Empson first read it.8 Empson’s poet “needed” “to externalise the conflict of an individual”9; so does Graves’s: “Poetry is for the poet a means of informing himself … of the relation in his mind of certain hitherto inharmonious interests, you may call them his sub-personalities or other selves … [I] t enables him to be rid of these conflicts between his sub-personalities.”10 For Empson’s poet, poetry is a “clinical thing” in response to “mental conflict”11; so it is both for Graves’s poet and his reader: “a well-chosen anthology should be a medicine chest against all ordinary mental disorders … Poetry may take the form of merely stating the nature of the conflict between these [sub-personalities’] interests, a diagnosing of the ailment, in the form of pity, doubt, resentment, or merely a cry of pain; it may be a temporary relief, a narcotic or counter-irritant, which I call poetry of escape; or it may take the completer form of prescribing for the cure of the ailment, suggesting how a new common life can be formed between these conflicting interests by the intervention of some medicating influence.”12
Most of the 1947 preface – about two-thirds of it – is taken up with a long-delayed response to James Smith’s 1931 Criterion review of Seven Types of Ambiguity, from which Empson quotes at length. Interestingly, an important part of his quarrel with Smith implicitly concerns Graves’s conflict theory: “Quite a number of Mr. Empson’s analyses … are interesting only as revelations of the poet’s, or of Mr. Empson’s, ingenious mind. Further, some of Mr. Empson’s analyses deal, not with words and sentences, but with conflicts supposed to have raged within the author when he wrote. Here, it seems to me, he has very probably left poetry completely behind.”13 Smith also complains that because Empson finds ambiguity “everywhere in the drama, in our social experience, in the fabric of our minds, he is led to assume it must be discoverable everywhere in great poetry,” a thesis of which Smith doubts that the reader “is even prepared to be convinced.”14
In answering each charge – that he indulges in suppositions about the mental state of poets and that he believes that ambiguity is omnipresent in great poetry because it is omnipresent in life itself – Empson invokes the work of Graves. That he should do so is not surprising, for Smith presumably alludes by his reference to “conflicts supposed to have raged within the author” to the influence of Graves on Empson. Smith makes it clear that no more than Richards does he accept all this unverifiable nonsense about conflicts supposedly raging within writers. Smith, in fact, is the type of critic of his method that Empson had anticipated from the beginning.
Perhaps just as interesting is the possibility that Empson’s response to Smith’s criticism of Seven Types of Ambiguity serves, in part, as a long-deferred response to Riding’s insults about the book. For Smith’s ad hominem observation in 1931 that “Quite a number of Mr. Empson’s analyses … are interesting only as revelations of the poet’s, or of Mr. Empson’s, ingenious mind” anticipates a much more vituperative version of the same charge in a letter from Riding. According to Miranda Seymour,
On February 24, 1939, Laura Riding wrote to William Empson from France, shortly before she went with Graves to America. In this letter, held in a private collection, Miss Riding took Empson to task. She told him, to paraphrase, that his delight in ambiguity represented no fundamental ambiguity in meanings but an ambiguity in himself. All of his seeming precision in the midst of apparent ambiguity was an inexactness of himself, in inexact apprehension of truth offered as criticism. Slightly wrong, she went on, was not almost true. He behaved as if he was the teacher, “and you are not that.” This “feeling” about him had crystallised and it was her duty to tell him. No answer was desired.15
Seymour wonders whether “this letter perhaps contribute [d] to Empson’s decision to delete any acknowledgment to Graves or to Riding in the 1947 edition, and all subsequent ones, of his book.”16 In point of fact, of course, acknowledgment of and references to the work of Graves endures, but Riding is done and dusted as far as Empson is concerned.
•
Smith claims that “a poem is not a mere fragment of life” ( “a bundle of diverse forces, bound together only by their co-existence”), for a poem “is a fragment that has been detached, considered, and judged by a mind.”17 In response, Empson suggests that a poet “has to judge what he has written and get it right.”18 Empson’s point is that Smith’s exaltation of the poem as noumenally transcending its phenomenal beginning – its beginning as an experience that is no more than “a bundle of forces, bound together only by their co-existence,” a beginning transcended because this fragment of the poet’s life has been “judged by a mind” – ignores an important fact: “the judgment of the author may be wrong.”19 To illustrate this point, Empson says that “Mr. Robert Graves … has remarked that a poem might happen to survive which later critics called ‘the best poem the age produced,’ and yet there had been no question of publishing it in that age, and the author had supposed himself to have destroyed the manuscript … This has no bearing on any ‘conflict’ theory; it is only part of the difficulty as to whether a poem is a noumenon or a phenomenon. Critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew.”20
Graves’s first work of critical theory, On English Poetry, defines poetry in terms of these tensions. On the one hand, poetry is “the unforeseen fusion … of apparently contradictory emotional ideas … Every poem worthy of the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous process.”21 On the other hand, “later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry more consciously as an art”; this entails “the more-or-less deliberate attempt … to impose an illusion of actual experience on the minds of others.”22 And so, the poet “creates in passion, then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.”23
Practising poetry consciously as an art, the poet must make many judgments: “One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.”24 No less important are judgments more local: “One of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times actually come in the conscious stage of composition when you have to consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to use.”25 The danger of making a mistake is continuous from the first ideas and images in the mind to the final words and punctuation marks on the page.
In Poetic Unreason, Graves notes that poetry has always been written “to externalise the conflict of an individual” for “It would not have been sensible to do such hard work unless the man himself needed it”; in his preface to the second edition of his book, Empson repeats Graves’s point that “the act of composition is primarily not communication between the individual poet and his neighbours, but an inter-communication of the different selves formed within the individual.”26 The poet’s judgment is required “when the poet wakes up to the poem as a poem” and it moves from the private and personal sphere to the public and universal sphere:
Although there are a number of poems in which the communicative spirit is present from the start as a factor in the conflict, where the poet has missionary intentions or wishes to use the poem as a social weapon, yet in a vast number of cases the poem as it appears in its first draft has no communicative intention at all … [M] y experience of the first drafts of other poets’ work and my own is that generally while the poem is what I might call a private poem not yet dispassionately viewed as a marketable commodity, the neat hand-writing, cleanliness, and orderliness of the communicative spirit are conspicuously absent. But when the poet wakes up to the poem as a poem, and if he considers it as entitling him to a certain dignity as its author, he begins the secondary or tertiary elaboration … But by then the poem has already fulfilled its primary function and has become a commodity or a record, nothing more.27
Judgment is required in the secondary or tertiary elaboration of the poem, and judgment can be wrong. Consciousness cannot always make sense of the spontaneous fusion of contradictory emotional ideas: “spontaneous poetry untested by conscious analysis has the … weakness of being liable to surface faults and unintelligible thought-connections,” thought-connections that can be “so free as to puzzle the author himself.”28 As a craftsman, the poet must correct surface faults and make thought-connections intelligible. Proper craft displays “a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately provides.”29 In the crafted poem faithful to the spontaneous process from which it emerged, “the underlying associations of each word … form close combinations of emotion unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.”30 As we have seen, “In this way, the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a picture-book puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of assembling the scattered parts of ‘Red Riding Hood with the Basket of Food’ he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another scene of tragedy – ‘The Wolf eating the Grandmother.’”31 The poet who is too deliberate, the poet who “has only the very small conscious part of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are only on the surface,” can make a mess of things: “careless arrangement of the less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what confusion below!”32
Empson and Graves agree that literary judgment itself – whether the poet’s, the reader’s, or the critic’s – is itself phenomenal. Graves denies that “there is somewhere already written a wholly good poetry … that is always good poetry and always good medicine for any age.”33 And he denies that “there is a kind of poetry which does not and cannot serve any possible need either for the poet or the reader.”34 “Aesthetic canons of good and bad” are relative (a function of time and place) and pragmatic (a function of usefulness): “One age values emotional intensity, another values sophistication and emotional restraint; one age demands a high standard of craftsmanship, another demands an anarchic abandon of grammatical or logical control … My suggestion is that these criteria are not accidental or foreseeable; they represent a need on the part of critics for poetry that will repair certain deficiencies or maintain certain successes not only in poetry of the past, but also in the social, religious and scholastic conditions at the time obtaining.”35 This is the context within which Empson’s quotation of Graves in response to Smith’s criticism arises.
And so immediately following his reference to Graves’s observation in Poetic Unreason about the poem that “everyone … agrees to damn” at one time but at a later time agrees to regard as “the best poem that the age produced,” Empson duplicates these arguments by Graves about the relative and pragmatic nature of the canons of aesthetic criticism.36 They inform his observations about an art show in 1946, “a grand semi-government exhibition of the painter Constable in London … starring only two big canvasses, both described as ‘studies’”: “Constable painted them only as the second of three stages in making an Academy picture, and neither could nor would ever have exhibited them. I do not know how they survived. They are being called by some critics (quite wrongly, I understand) the roots of the whole nineteenth-century development of painting. It seems obvious to many people now that they are much better than Constable’s finished works … Of course, the present fashion for preferring [them] may be wrong, too; the point I am trying to make is that this final ‘judgment’ is a thing which must be indefinitely postponed.”37
Empson recalls not just Graves’s observation about “the best poem of the age,” then, but also the fact that it was part of Graves’s consideration of whether either a poem or any judgement about it is a noumenon or a phenomenon: “Would Mr. James Smith say that the ‘study,’ which is now more admired than the finished work, was a noumenon or a phenomenon? I do not see any way out of the dilemma which would leave the profound truths he was expressing much importance for a practical decision.”38
Empson’s observations regarding the Constable exhibition also develop another observation by Graves, this one concerning analogies between painting and poetry in terms of their origin in mental conflict and their subsequent development as discovery of this conflict. According to Graves,
Art of every sort … is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the painter says “That’s really good to paint” and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and as simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the moon or something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the London Mercury.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem.39
Similarly, although Empson acknowledges that “it seems obvious to many people now that they [Constable’s ‘studies’] are much better than Constable’s finished works,” he emphasizes that in the course of Constable’s production of his paintings over time, the very process that Graves outlines occurred: a process of secondary and tertiary craftsmanship via deliberate judgments made after “he got an idea,” a process that Graves describes as attempting “to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind.”40 “Nobody pretends that they were an uprush of the primitive or in some psychological way ‘not judged’ by Constable. When he got an idea he would make a preliminary sketch on the spot, then follow his bent in studio (obviously very fast), and then settle down on another canvas to make a presentable picture out of the same thing.”41 Constable follows the process of composition that Graves outlines for “art of every sort,” from “the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas” to “the duty … as craftsman to present this nucleus in the most effective way possible.”42
Insisting that the studies are better than the finished Academy pictures, “you could defend the judgment of Constable by saying that he betrayed his art to make a living, but this would be absurdly unjust to him”;43 as absurd as thinking that poets write odes to the moon or that artists paint a jug or a bottle “to get two guineas for it from the London Mercury.”44
•
As Empson sees it, by complaining that analysis of merely “supposed” conflicts in the author leaves poetry completely behind, Smith “was striking at the roots of criticism.”45 It is not just that “critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew”; according to Empson, “If critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt.”46 Empson recalls Graves’s “Defence of Poetic Analysis” in Poetic Unreason: “Appreciation of a poem means nothing less than a certain intimate knowledge of the author.”47 Graves proves the axiom by reference to “any … poem whose author is either anonymous or nothing but a name”: “we find that our knowledge of the poet’s politics, culture, nationality, his attitude to war, to love, to virtue, to truth, in fact all his important characteristics, is considerable.”48 Condemned to contempt is “the myopic literary historian who denies that we know anything at all about the author of an anonymous poem … [I] f we had no knowledge the poem would convey to us as little as the as yet undeciphered inscriptions on Etruscan tombs or Mya tablets.”49
According to Graves, “Emotional poetry demands that if the rhythmic hypnotism of the verse is to be effective or the symbolism intuitively understood … then the reader must be in a mood analogous to the poet’s when he wrote the poem … To put it plainly, the only hopeful study of poetry is by examining the phase of mental conflict in the reader which allowed him to appreciate by analogy the emotional force of certain symbols and rhythms, and by then comparing this phase analytically with a phase of conflict in the mind of the poet, which historic research suggests as having given birth to the poem.”50 The first draft is precipitated out of this supposed mental conflict, and then it is elaborated through secondary and tertiary processes into a document of the poet’s own extended experience of the poem, which is passed down through time as the poem of record. The words are the keystone that joins the reader’s mood and the poet’s mood, and so the literary critic must be capable of accounting for the words in terms of both the reader’s mood and the poet’s mood.
Graves predicted in the 1920s that “there are new analytic methods which literary criticism never had at its disposal before and … these reinforcing the merely emotional comprehension … may provide us with an intimate knowledge of certain phases of an obscure poet’s life which before were mere blanks sparsely dotted with births, deaths, marriages and dates of publication”; in addition, this new method will lead to a new kind of literary criticism: “Research among dusty archives, and the sudden flashes of emotional recognition that come to the unscholarly general reader, are both methods of historic study and in the literary history of the future will tend towards a closer relation for a common end, and therewith lose their exclusive characters.”51 With these predictions, Graves seems to have foreseen the development in the late twentieth century of the “new historicism.”
Empson accepts that “those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers.”52 Like Graves, who describes the poet’s “more or less deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an illusion of actual experience on the mind of others,” Empson describes poetry as the poet’s presentation of a definite human experience via the same sort of verbal magic: “As I understand it, there is always in great poetry a feeling of generalization from a case which has been presented definitely; there is always an appeal to a background of human experience which is all the more present when it cannot be named.”53 And Empson accepts that the biographical information about the poet that comes through reading poetry constitutes knowledge of an intimate kind. Less concerned than Graves to identify the experience in question as the poet’s own (Empson explains that although “those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers … I am talking less about the minds of poets than about the mode of action of poetry”), Empson nonetheless insists, like Graves, that the reader’s reaction to the poem be traceable to – and justified by – the words of the poem that represent the experience in question: “What I would suppose is that, whenever a receiver of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple line, what are moving him are the traces of a great part of his past experience and of the structure of his past judgments. Considering what it feels like to take great pleasure in verse, I should think it surprising … if even the most searching criticism of such lines of verse could find nothing whatever in their implications to be the cause of so straddling a connection and so broad a calm.”54
•
When Empson quarrelled with Riding in the 1970s about her role in the birth of New Criticism, he “looked up some of the books concerned” and proceeded to cite chapter and verse in support of his argument that Graves alone deserved credit for inspiring the method of Seven Types of Ambiguity.55 In 1946 and 1947, however, as he revised his book and wrote a new preface for it, he had no such spur to get out Graves’s books once more. He seems instead to have relied on memory in citing Graves (a memory slightly faulty, as we have seen, insofar as Empson left a minor word out of the passage he cited, but a memory otherwise pretty accurate in recollecting particular observations and arguments in Graves’s early works). And so the enduring memory of Graves that is traceable in the preface to the second edition is further evidence of how deeply his work had entered into Empson’s mind by the end of the 1920s.
1 William Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1953; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1984), viii–ix.
2 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” viii–ix.
3 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” ix.
4 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 84–5.
5 Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 165, 163.
6 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 82.
7 Empson, letter to Laura Riding (25 April 1971), Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 434.
8 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” ix.
9 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” ix.
10 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 1–2.
11 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” ix.
12 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 2.
13 James Smith, “Books of the Quarter,” The Criterion, 10.41 (July 1931): 741, quoted by Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xii.
14 Ibid.
15 Miranda Seymour, “Robert Graves, Laura Riding, and William Empson,” accessed 1 December 2012, http://www.robertgraves.org/issues/37/2632_article_16.pdf.
16 bid.
17 Smith, “Books,” xii–xiii.
18 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiii.
19 Smith, “Books,” xii, xii; Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiv.
20 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiv.
21 Graves, On English Poetry, 13.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 128.
25 Ibid., 69.
26 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” ix; Graves, Poetic Unreason, 27.
27 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 26.
28 Graves, On English Poetry, 16.
29 Ibid., 24–5.
30 Ibid., 25.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 16, 25.
33 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 17.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 19, 18.
36 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 30.
37 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiv, xiv–xv.
38 Ibid., xiv, xv.
39 Graves, On English Poetry, 42–43.
40 Ibid., 42.
41 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiv, xiv, xiv.
42 Graves, On English Poetry, 42, 13, 13.
43 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xi.
44 Graves, On English Poetry, 43.
45 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiii.
46 Ibid., xiv, xiii–xiv.
47 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 89.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 92–3.
51 Ibid., 89–90.
52 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse, 1st ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 307.
53 Graves, On English Poetry, 13; Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xv.
54 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 307; Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xv.
55 Empson, letter to Riding (29 August 1970), Selected Letters, 428.