2
Empson was correct in foregrounding the importance of Graves’s influence upon him and accurate in belatedly acknowledging that this influence began not with A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) but rather with Graves’s earlier books: On English Poetry (1922), The Meaning of Dreams (1924), Poetic Unreason (1925), and Impenetrability, or The Proper Habit of English (1926). Graves’s claim to have suffered scant acknowledgment by Empson – had he ever been moved to make it – is much greater than Riding’s. Of course, before his assertion to the editor of the Modern Language Quarterly in 1966 that he was the author of the analysis of Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Graves never sought the credit for having inspired Empson and the New Criticism that Riding sought. Indeed, he held Empson in disdain: “Empson is as clever as a monkey & I do not like monkeys.”1
Haffenden unfortunately muddies matters somewhat when he points to a book review by Empson published in The Granta in May of 1928 as evidence that Empson had read A Survey of Modernist Poetry by then. Of George Rylands’s Words and Poetry (1928), Empson observes: “‘The Robert Graves’ school of criticism is only impressive when the analysis it employs becomes so elaborate as to score a rhetorical triumph; when each word in the line is given four or five meanings, four or five reasons for sounding right and suggesting the right things. Dazzled by the difficulty of holding it all in your mind at once, you feel this at any rate is complicated enough, as many factors as these could make up a result apparently magical and incalculable.”2 According to Haffenden, Empson “was evidently referring to A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Riding and Graves, because in none of his previous works had Graves orchestrated quite such an elaborate analysis as of the Shakespeare sonnet in that volume.”3 It may well be that Empson had read A Survey of Modernist Poetry by the time he wrote this review, but Haffenden’s argument that the review constitutes evidence for thinking so is by no means persuasive.
When he speaks of Graves’s rhetorical triumph in the reading of this or that “line,” Empson may be referring not necessarily to the reading of whole poems in A Survey of Modernist Poetry but rather to any number of books in which Graves reads the multiple meanings of the words in famous lines of poetry. He might be referring to Graves’s reading of multiple meanings in the line in Keats’s “Eve of St Agnes” in which “Madeleine is described in ‘her soft and chilly nest,’ ‘Clasped like a missal when swart Paynims pray,’ where ‘clasped’ means ‘fastened with a clasp of holiness’ or ‘held lovingly in the hands,’ if the Paynims are held to be converted; but also, without prejudice, ‘shut and coldly neglected,’ if the Paynims are held to be unconverted.”4 Or he might be referring to Graves’s explanation of the title of a book that impressed Empson very much, Impenetrability, or The Proper Habit of English: “The word ‘habit’ that heads this paper is serving three senses. It refers to the habilments or dress of English, that is the actual word-forms; to the general behaviour or carriage of the language; and to the habitual processes of thought which govern it. ‘Proper,’ the adjective qualifying ‘habit,’ has also three senses. It means ‘fitting,’ it means ‘peculiar,’ it means ‘distinguished.’ It has even a fourth meaning, for all who know the language of heraldry, and that is ‘blazoned in more than a single colour.’”5 Or he might be referring to the tour de force reading in Poetic Unreason of “How Many Miles to Babylon?” in which Graves reveals just “within the limits of the Christian group to which the associations of Babylon, candlelight, and threescore and ten are common” an “extraordinarily subtle and condensed argument” functioning by an “interaction” of these words’ various meanings – words interacting “too closely for coincidence,” the effect of which is the presentation “of a number of linked ideas reconciled in a common symbolism.”6 Furthermore, the word “dazzled” in the book review suggests a reading in On English Poetry that Empson recalled for Riding in 1970 as an impressive early example of Graves’s method: “take Webster’s most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi: ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young’ spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess’ body; and that word ‘dazzle’ does duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, tear-dazzled grief for early death.”7
So it is quite possible, in fact, that Empson had not read A Survey of Modernist Poetry by the time he wrote this review. His reference in the review to “‘The Robert Graves’ school of criticism” would then substantiate his claim to Riding in 1970 that he had indeed recognized a method of criticism in Graves’s early work before he read A Survey of Modernist Poetry, would show that he recognized the same method beginning to be picked up by others such as Rylands, and would suggest that even before he read A Survey of Modernist Poetry he was indeed predisposed to regard the book by Riding and Graves as another product of the Robert Graves school of criticism, regardless of the fact of its co-authorship. From this point of view, the review in question would corroborate the “early-Graves alibi” that Riding dismissed as disingenuous and incredible.
Empson’s problem of finding “the right thing to mention” in acknowledgment of Graves’s influence is not one that it is easy to understand or sympathize with today. Even were Seven Types of Ambiguity to have been written a little bit later in twentieth century, the scholarly standards that have since come to prevail in the professional criticism of English literature (which was still a relatively new academic discipline in the 1920s) would have led Empson to invoke Graves by name at several points in the book, and to refer to his works by title and page number.
As things stand, Empson refers to very few contemporary critics and theorists, and refers to even fewer of their works by title: Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, Freud’s Notebooks, and Richards’s Practical Criticism. He acknowledges an interpretation of Hopkins’s “The Windhover” by Richards, but does not mention the article that contains it or the journal that published it, and he mentions Richards’s discussion of poems in terms of Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention, but does not identify the book in which Richards makes these distinctions (Principles of Literary Criticism). And without explaining where, Empson notes that Shelley’s “Skylark” “has received much discussion lately,” confessing “I am afraid more points were brought out than I remembered” before implying that it was T.S. Eliot who started the discussion and that it is Eliot’s opinion that needs to be corrected.8 Similarly, he elsewhere vaguely refers to what “Mr. Eliot somewhere says” about bad critics.9 Here are confessions of a lack of scholarly interest in the citing of sources that would be regarded by scholars and critics today as rather cavalier.
When he revises Seven Types of Ambiguity for the second edition in 1947, however, Empson chides himself in a footnote for not having acknowledged even so indirect an influence as G.K. Chesterton’s ( “I ought to have acknowledged how much I was using … incidental remarks” of Chesterton’s that showed his “great powers as a verbal critic”).10 Between the first and second editions of the book, that is, scholarly standards were changing from the belle-lettristic norms at the beginning of the century to norms closer to those we are familiar with today.
Oddly, then, at the very point when he ought to have made his acknowledgment of his debts to Riding and Graves fuller and more precise, Empson not only compounds the problem by omitting any reference to A Survey of Modernist Poetry but also makes for a new problem in his fumbled acknowledgment of Graves. Although he notes, “I ought to say in passing that he is, so far as I know, the inventor of the method of analysis I was using here,” this acknowledgment is both less prominent and more vague than the original introductory note.11 It is reduced to parenthetical status, as Empson now cites Graves in support of a different point altogether, and a relatively minor one at that: that “the judgment of the author may be wrong” in regard to his own work.12
Although he does not cite it by title, Empson quotes from a passage in Poetic Unreason in which Graves accounts for the fluctuating appeal of a poem in terms of the relevance at any particular time of the poem’s statement or solution of some sort of human conflict. According to Graves, “We do not and cannot value in a poem a statement of conflict, or a temporary relief, or a final solution which is too far in the future or too far in the past to be real to us.”13 The appeal of the poets of a certain period is explicable in these terms: “Each generation gives a sort of solution to the more deep-seated problems of life, a solution which appears at the time to be as complete and incontrovertible as it is inevitable … The most venerated poet of any period will be the one who embodies in his works the problems and conclusions of the most advanced system of contemporary philosophy accepted by the intellectual aristocracy.”14 Yet “always the appearance of a hitherto unconsidered aspect of reality stultifies” a generation’s solutions to its conflicts, and the moment that “a new system of philosophy” discredits the old one, the venerated poets of the old system will find that “their conflicts will be appreciated in outline, but their solutions will no longer be regarded as adequate” – unless here and there a venerated past poet somehow contrives to anticipate the future.15 It is the passage from the middle of this account that Empson recalls:
From the reader’s point of view it is of course true that in any given age certain poems are of wider appeal than others and therefore by majority rule the best, and that others represent a view which is of extremely limited acceptance but which is one stage advanced in the succession of events from this popular poetry, and being destined to the votes of the majority in the next generation may be “best” in this sense, that it is more progressive … If a strange poem occurs which everyone, including the poet himself, after mature consideration agrees to damn as being completely banal, meaningless, unrhythmic, immoral, untrue and designed with the most inexcusable motives, it is always possible that this poem if it survives will appear to future historians as a remarkable piece of art, embodying an aspect of reality by neglecting which the age imposed on itself what they may regard as a number of avoidable ills – “the best poem that the age produced,” they will write enthusiastically.16
Writing his Preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1947, Empson forgets titles and he forgets collaborators – and in this instance he forgets to quote the subordinate conjunction “that” – but he does not forget observations, arguments, or methods, whether these be grounded in Graves’s version of literary history, his psychoanalytical literary theory, or his practical criticism of particular writers and texts.
•
One consequence of his correspondence with Riding in the 1970s was to prompt Empson to recall Graves’s prominent role as a literary theorist in the early 1920s. Explaining to Riding that the lack of an erratum slip in copies of Seven Types of Ambiguity sold in the United States was of no real consequence because only eight copies of the book were sold there, Empson suggested to her that sales in Britain had been better because Graves’s theorizing had prepared readers for a theory of ambiguity: “I am sorry to hear that the American edition did not carry it, but I think I can explain that. When they sent a statement after the first year only eight people had bought the book; I offered to send each of them a Christmas card but they could not be traced. I was told that most of the edition was not merely remaindered but pulped … The American public just would not stand the idea, whereas the English reviews were quite lively and there was a small but steady sale till the edition sold out; I suppose the difference arose because the books of Robert Graves had already made the idea familiar in England.”17
Writing to others at the same time, Empson alluded to the research into Graves’s early influence upon him that his correspondence with Riding had prompted, and he explained it more fully to them than he did to her.
Of course, you know everybody was talking about Freud and things like that. I might have got it from many other people who are now forgotten as well as Graves. But I bet I had read more of Graves than I remember now and I was certainly keen on this stuff and wanted to imitate it. I really don’t remember now at all clearly but there’s no doubt I was picking it up. But it didn’t seem, you know, very out of the way – the idea that you wanted to use Freudian theory on literary criticism somehow was the thing that Graves picked up a generation before me. We all had it knocking about. But I certainly did read Graves. I’m just having to think about that – I mean having to get out some of the books and consider what I remember having read at the time. I had read quite a bit.18
Indeed, Graves’s influence informs Empson’s theory and practice from beginning to end of Seven Types of Ambiguity. In Chapter Three, for instance, Empson notes that: “There is a variety of the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry which says that a poet must always be concerned with some difference of opinion or habit between different parts of his community; different social classes, ways of life, or modes of thought; that he must be several sorts of men at once, and reconcile his tribe in his own person.”19 Empson puts the word conflict in quotation marks because it constitutes Graves’s main topic in each of his first three books. But he doesn’t acknowledge the source, though he paraphrases Graves’s assertion in Poetic Unreason that “the poet in the fullest sense of the word must stand in the middle of the larger society to which he belongs and reconcile in his poetry the conflicting views of every group, trade, class and interest in that society.”20 As Haffenden observes, “Empson really must have been telling the truth when he said that … passages from Graves’s first writings … had indeed inspired his interest in ambiguity.”21
Haffenden does not follow up on this insight. First, he neglects to indicate other points in Seven Types of Ambiguity where Empson actually writes from within the “conflict” theory, as when he explains the “great deal of energy” in Yeats’s poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” in terms of Yeats’s ability to be “several sorts of men at once”: “the poet … contemporaneously living all lives, may fitly be holding before him both lives of Fergus, and drawing the same moral from either of them.”22 Haffenden also neglects to indicate that Graves had worked out this conflict theory in an even earlier book. In On English Poetry (1922), Graves defines “the typical poet” in the same terms, but at greater length:
A poet in the fullest sense is … an intermediary between the small-group consciousness of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To … many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to … many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practicing his exceptionally developed powers of intuition … But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous, more varied and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater than the sum of its parts.23
According to Graves, in the poet as “spokesman” of the “group-mind of his culture,” “men of smaller scope … hear at times in his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.”24
•
Graves bases his conflict theory on the work of W.H.R. Rivers, as Empson recognized. In a notebook entry of 1932, for instance, one finds Empson reminding himself of “Graves social conflict e.g. Rivers” (sic).25 It is by summarizing Rivers’s books Instinct and the Unconscious and Conflict and Dream that Graves explains in The Meaning of Dreams the approach to dreams in particular and to the unconscious generally that underwrites his own literary theory: “Dr. Rivers … traces the part played in dreams by what is called Dissociation, that is the breaking up of the human individual into two or more rival ‘selves’ under the stress of difficult circumstances … [W] hen we are up against a problem that has two possible ways out … we split up [into] two selves, each self standing for one of these opposing courses of action … When a person is in a conflict between two selves, and one self is stronger than the other throughout the waking life, the weaker side becomes victorious in dream.”26 By allowing expression to the repressed self, dreams of conflict balance the personality that has split in waking life. Rivers might seem to follow Freud and Jung on this point, so Graves hastens to add that “the so-called ‘unconscious self’ … is not the sort of primitive bogey that people think, but is just the self which in conflict happens at the time to be beaten.”27 Further distancing his understanding of dreams from that of Freud and Jung, Graves suggests that “the usual claim of modern dream-interpreters is not justified, when they say that once a dream of conflict is interpreted the conflict thereby ends.”28 A symbol’s effectiveness might thereby disappear, according to Graves, but not the conflict: “If a dream of conflict is interpreted and the conflict remains strong, the dream will merely change its symbols and come again in a new guise.”29
Remarking upon Empson’s 1932 notebook reference to “Graves social conflict” (sic), Haffenden suggests that “whereas Graves’s dictum was sociological, and even political, Empson stresses in his response a clear psychological note.”30 This suggestion is rather baffling, however, for Rivers’s view of conflict is the key to understanding all of Graves’s criticism in the 1920s prior to his collaboration with Riding, and of course Rivers’s perspective is thoroughly psychological. Furthermore, the point that Graves emphasizes over and over again in On English Poetry, The Meaning of Dreams, and Poetic Unreason is that poetry and dreams represent similar psychological events. Even many years later, in 1971, Empson recalls that it was the Freudian dimension of Graves’s literary criticism that drew his attention. So it would be more accurate to say not that the clear psychological note in Empson departs from the work of Graves, but rather that it echoes the very early work where the same note is sounded – and sounded first (indeed, according to Empson, “a generation before”).
In On English Poetry, which was dedicated to Rivers, Graves treats romantic poetry as analogous to dream, declaring that “emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry.”31 Poetry’s usefulness for both the writer and the reader consists in the way it deals with emotional conflict. For the poet, poetry is “the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas.”32 After this “spontaneous process … over which the poet has no direct control,” it “becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus [ “the unforeseen fusion in his mind”] in the most effective way possible” so that the poem can function for the reader as it does for the poet: “Poetry … is a form of psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind … poetry has the power of homeopathically healing other men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them … with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished.”33 The always romantic Graves hybridizes here Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Rivers’s version of psychoanalysis.
Poetic Unreason (1925) – to which The Meaning of Dreams (1924) “should be read as an introduction” – restates many of these points.34 After all, it was “intended as a sober development of certain wayward notes on poetic psychology published three years ago in … On English Poetry.”35 So the “conflict theory” is just as prominent here – from the opening pages onward – as it is in the earlier book: “Poetry is for the poet a means of informing himself on many planes simultaneously … of the relation in his mind of certain hitherto inharmonious interests, you may call them his sub-personalities or other selves … [T] he writing of poetry … enables him to be rid of these conflicts between his sub-personalities.”36 In fact, the word “conflict” is everywhere in Graves’s theorizing: “Poetry may take the form of merely stating the nature of the conflict between these interests … 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 the cure of the ailment, suggesting how a new common life can be formed between these conflicting interests.”37 And the conflict is clearly, for the poet, a psychological one.
And so it is for the reader, too. According to Graves, “the reading of poetry performs a similar service” to the one it performs for the poet:
my experience as a reader of poetry is that I value in a poem the solution of the conflict when I am to some extent aware of the nature of the conflict, but that where there is hitherto only vague unrest in my mind I value in a poem the clearly defined statement of the conflict. It is not that as readers we value the conflict on its own account; that is not natural economy. We value the statement of it because this is halfway to a solution … In any state of the conflict before the solution is possible, we are glad of narcotic poetry of temporary relief; or of a counter-irritant, which, though at first sight a case of conflict valued on its own account, is rather a sparring match where the spectator takes no sides but may see sweat and strain and bloodshed from which he is excused, and feel happier by contrast with his own more secure life.38
Graves’s “conflict theory” is foregrounded in each of his first three books, and it is clearly a theory that Empson knows quite well.
This conflict theory also appears in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, but only indirectly, and not in such a way that Empson or any other reader could have understood from this book alone the role that it played in Graves’s practice of criticism before he began his collaboration with Riding. Riding regarded the psychological dimensions of Graves’s early literary criticism as a Trojan horse by which the scientist’s criterion for determining truth – the accurate representation of reality (in this case, the poet’s individual psychological reality) – gained entrance into a poetic domain that ought to be independent of it. According to Riding, as we shall see, psychological approaches to literature – whether the more-or-less Freudian approach of Graves or the more-or-less behaviourist approach of Richards – attempt to ground poetry in the psychological reality of the poet, whereas poetry can properly be grounded only in the unreality of the individual’s imagination.
Even if only briefly and indirectly, however, conflict theory surfaces in the reading of Sonnet 129, for, determined to show “what great difference in the sense the juggling of punctuation marks has made in Shakespeare’s original sonnet,” Riding and Graves argue that revisions to lines eleven and twelve since Shakespeare’s time have suppressed the conflict at the heart of the poem: “The punctuated line in the revised version, cut off from what has gone before and from what follows [by a semicolon], can only mean: ‘In prospect, lust is joy; in retrospect, a dream.’ Though a possible contributory meaning, as the only meaning it makes the theme of the poem that lust is impossible of satisfaction, whereas the theme is, as carried on by the next line, that lust as lust is satisfiable but that satisfied lust is in conflict with itself. The next line, if unpunctuated except for the comma Shakespeare put at the end, is a general statement of this conflict.”39
The conflict theory appears here only incidentally and suggests none of the psychoanalytical framework that Graves imported into his literary criticism from Rivers’s analysis of dreams. Furthermore, the psychological conflict is defined as a universal condition of the experience of lust rather than as a particular condition from which Shakespeare suffered. Still, in the context of Empson’s familiarity with and admiration for the theory of poetry developed in Graves’s other early works, this reference to the conflict at the heart of Shakespeare’s sonnet helps to explain Empson’s impression that this particular part of the book was written by Graves.
Graves was so well known by 1929 for this method of literary analysis, of course, that Empson did not feel that he had to name him as the author of the conflict theory to which he refers at various points in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Perhaps also familiar at this time with Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, published in May of 1928 (Empson refers knowledgeably to Riding’s essay “The Damned Thing” from Anarchism Is Not Enough during his correspondence with her in the 1970s), Empson may have known of her contempt for the psychological approach to literature and assumed that she did not write this part of the book.40 This discussion of Shakespeare in terms of the conflict at the heart of his sonnet helps to substantiate Graves’s claim at least to have been involved in Survey’s analysis of Sonnet 129, if not to have been the sole author of it, for Riding would not have used the language of Graves’s conflict theory in writing that was hers alone.
But although he declares Graves’s “‘conflict’ theory of poetry” a “rather limited formula,” Empson actually acknowledges that it is relevant to his understanding of several other types of ambiguity.41 Indeed, simply by pointing out that that “the ‘conflict” theory of poetry” applies “especially to generalised ambiguity of the third type,” he implies that it applies also to at least some ambiguities of other types.42 In the 1947 Preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, he suggests that “good poetry is usually written from a background of conflict.”43 Empson waters down to the status of merely a usual condition of poetry, however, what Graves regards as a precondition of poetry: “emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry”; “emotional conflict … I regard as essential for poetry”; “emotional conflict … is the whole cause and meaning of poetry.”44
Similarly, his letters to Riding and others in the 1970s indicate that for all the details of his reading of Graves that he had forgotten, Empson remembered very well after more than forty years the inspiring impression Graves’s early works had made upon him. With reference to the chapter “Conflict of Emotions” in On English Poetry (1922), Empson writes to Riding that he recalls being “greatly struck” by Graves’s discussion of the multiple meanings of the word “perfume” spoken by Lady Macbeth and the multiple meanings of the word “dazzle” spoken by Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, explaining to Riding that Graves “is mainly concerned in the book with the Conflict Theory of poetry, that is a healing process through the confrontation of opposed impulses. This is the necessary background for a theory of poetical ambiguity, which he was approaching. He had reached it by 1926, with Impenetrability, or the Proper Habit of English.”45 Riding was not much impressed by Graves’s reading of these lines, and she was even less impressed by Empson’s attempt to locate the inspiration for his method in work by Graves that pre-dated her collaboration with him.
Empson represents his purpose in the original acknowledgment of Graves to have been “to make some wholehearted acknowledgment of the inspiration that he had given me.”46 Although the passages from On English Poetry and Impenetrability “were really very decisive,” Empson suggests that he decided the treatment of Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry “would be the right thing to mention” because “it dealt with a complete poem” (to deal with complete poems being his own ambition in Seven Types of Ambiguity) and because “it had a cumulative weight and impressiveness,” as against passages in On English Poetry and Impenetrability that “looked a bit scrappy.”47 And so it would seem to have been very sloppy thinking that led to his implying in the 1930 introductory note that Graves’s influence upon him can be accounted for by reference to A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Only in the retrospect prompted by Riding’s complaints in 1970 does he indicate that he found in Graves’s work before A Survey of Modernist Poetry his inspiration for insights into the non-syntactical uses of ambiguity that he explains in Seven Types of Ambiguity. That is, only in retrospect, it seems, has he identified in its discussion of ambiguous syntax any treatment of ambiguity in A Survey of Modernist Poetry distinct from that he found in Graves’s earlier works.
Searching off and on for more than forty years to find the right way of mentioning Graves, to say nothing of his desire “to make some wholehearted acknowledgment of the inspiration” Graves had given him, Empson cannot at any point be said to have succeeded. To demonstrate how much more wholehearted an acknowledgment of Graves’s influence ought to have been included in the introductory note to and main text of Seven Types of Ambiguity, I shall show here some of the ways that the conflict theory influences Empson.
•
Referring explicitly to Graves’s conflict theory regularly throughout Seven Types of Ambiguity, but never in a way adequately to acknowledge either its author or, more importantly, its influence upon him, Empson even refers to it implicitly on the very first page of the book when he offers a sample sentence that shows that “in a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement is ambiguous.”48 The sentence “The brown cat sat on the red mat” is ostensibly advanced to show that not all ambiguous statements are interesting to literary criticism. Empson translates this sentence into different and more complicated terms ( “‘This is a statement about a cat. The cat the statement is about is brown,’ and so forth”) to show how “irrelevant” such trivial ambiguity of this “extended sense” is to literary criticism.49 It turns out, however, that “two facts about this sentence, that it is about a cat and that it is suited to a child,” mean that “to form an ambiguity worth notice,” Empson need “only isolate two of its meanings”: “it has contradictory associations, which might cause some conflict in the child who heard it, in that it might come out of a fairy story and might come out of Reading without Tears.”50
Reading without Tears, or A Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read, is a collection of Victorian nursery rhymes by Favell Lee Mortimer with a tendency to describe, and even to recommend, in its simple, single-syllable words, violence toward animals – for example, “Bill is a big lad. / Bill has a bad dog./ Get a rod. Hit a dog” – thus leaving readers educated in such a literary tradition experiencing conflict, Empson implies, should they wonder whether a sentence with a rhyme like Mortimer’s might also be followed by a reasoning eventuating in recommendations like hers: “Get a bat. Hit a cat.”51 Of course the point to note is that at the beginning of Seven Types of Ambiguity, the first ambiguity of interest to Empson is marked by psychological conflict: the engine of Graves’s theory of poetry.
Similarly, in the middle of his book, despite characterizing “the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry” as a “rather limited formula,” Empson affirms the broadly psychoanalytical assumption at the heart of Graves’s theory and explains how the theory applies “especially to generalised ambiguity of the third type,” in which “two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously”: “The mind has compartments holding opinions and modes of judgment which conflict when they come together … compartments, therefore, which require attention, and one is particularly conscious of anything that mixes them up. If the two spheres of action of a generalization … involve two such compartments which must be thought of in two ways, we have the conditions for a general ambiguity of the third type.”52 The distinction between, on the one hand, the two “compartments” of Empson’s poet’s mind and, on the other, the two “sub-personalities” of Graves’s poet’s mind does not amount to a difference.
Empson demonstrates the “clash between different modes of feeling” in poetry of this kind by the example of the last verse of Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament:
Haste therefore each degree
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage.
Mount we unto the sky;
I am sick, I must die –
Lord, have mercy upon us.53
Here “the different modes of feeling … [are] laid side by side so as to produce ‘poetry by juxtaposition’”: “The first line of the last three gives the arrogant exaltation of the mystic … The second, sweeping this mood aside, gives the mere terror of the natural man at the weakness of the body and the approach of death. The third gives the specifically Christian fusion of these two elements into … humility.”54 Such poetry “becomes ambiguous by making the reader assume that the elements are similar and may be read consecutively, by the way one must attempt to reconcile them or find each in the other, by the way the successive ideas act in the mind.”55
Over the course of the next two pages, however, it emerges that, with certain qualifications, the conflict of “different modes of feeling” at the heart of ambiguity of the third type is also at the heart of other ambiguities – especially the fourth type, in which “two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author.”56 And so if you say of the conflicting elements in Nashe’s verse that they do not actually represent type-three ambiguity – that is, if you say of the elements of the conflict that “the experience they convey is too strong to be conceived as a series of contrasts; that one is able to reconcile the different elements; that one is not conscious of their difference but only of the grandeur of the imagination which brought them together” – then Empson merely shifts ground: “In so far as this is true, the example belongs to my fourth chapter.”57 The conflict of “different modes of feeling” endures. The question is not about whether or not there is such a conflict of feelings, but whether or not the conflicting feelings are reconciled.
Furthermore, from yet another perspective, this conflict of “different modes of feeling” can be seen at the heart of ambiguities of the seventh type, too, in which there is full contradiction “so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind.”58 In the last lines of Nashe’s poem, “you may say that two opposites – the fear of death and the hope of glory – are here stated together so as to produce a sort of contradiction; and that the humility of the last line then acts as evasion of the contradiction, which moves it out of the conscious mind into a region of the judgment which can accept it without reconciling it. In so far as this is true, the example belongs to my seventh chapter.”59
Not surprisingly, then, in Chapter Seven, the “conflict” theory emerges once more – this time in connection with the poet George Herbert, whom Empson treats as a person divided in his own mind just as much as the metaphors, symbols, and images are divided in his poems. On the one hand, in a poem like Herbert’s “The Sacrifice,” “the contradictory impulses that are held in equilibrium by the doctrine of atonement may be seen in luminous juxtaposition”; on the other hand, “in such cases of ambiguity of the seventh type one tends to lose sight of the conflict they assume; the ideas are no longer thought of as contradictory by the author, or if so, only from a stylistic point of view; he has no doubt that they can be reconciled, and that he is stating their reconciliation.”60
Empson suggests that “to this extent, the poem is outside the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry,” yet it is not really outside the purview of Graves’s theory, nor is Empson yet beyond Graves’s influence.61 Just as for Graves “Poetry may take the form of merely stating the nature of the conflict … or it may take the completer form of prescribing the cure of the ailment, suggesting how a new common life can be formed between these conflicting interests,” so for Empson “The Sacrifice” “assumes, as does its theology, the existence of conflicts” and “the various sets of conflicts in the Christian doctrine of the Sacrifice are stated with an assured and easy simplicity,” “but its business is to state a generalised solution of them.”62
One notes that the idea of conflict is at the heart of the definition of ambiguity of the seventh type (this type, “the most ambiguous that can be conceived, occurs when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the author’s mind”) and one recalls that, according to Haffenden, Empson seems to have started his work on Seven Types of Ambiguity with analysis of the second and seventh types. Sure enough, Graves is just as much an obvious presence in Chapter Seven as he is in Chapter Two.63 Speculating that “the idea of ‘opposite’ is a comparatively late human invention,” and invoking the example of “primitive languages on the authority of Freud” (his example of a language that unites opposites in one word is Ancient Egyptian), Empson concludes that “words uniting two opposites are seldom or never actually formed in a language to express the conflict between them; such words come to exist for more sensible reasons, and may then be used to express conflict.”64 Contemplating the role of opposites “in the Freudian analysis of dreams,” but wishing to consider “more serious cases” of opposition than the “dissatisfaction” with which he associates “a Freudian opposite,” Empson soon turns his thoughts to Graves’s conflict theory: “In more serious cases, causing wider emotional reverberation, such as are likely to be reflected in language, in poetry, or in dreams, it marks a centre of conflict; the notion of what you want involves the notion that you must not take it … that you want something different in another part of your mind. Of course, conflict need not be expressed overtly as contradiction, but it is likely that those theories of aesthetics which regard poetry as the resolution of a conflict will find their illustrations chiefly in the limited field covered by the seventh type.”65
Graves’s conflict theory shapes Empson’s reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Windhover”: “in the first three lines of the sestet we seem to have a clear case of the Freudian use of opposites, where two things thought of as incompatible, but desired intensely by different systems of judgments, are spoken of simultaneously by words applying to both; both desires are thus given a transient and exhausting satisfaction, and the two systems of judgment are forced into open conflict before the reader.”66 We have seen all of these points made by Graves: for the poet, poetry is “the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas”; “Poetry is for the poet a means of informing himself on many planes simultaneously … of the relation in his mind of certain hitherto inharmonious interests, you may call them his sub-personalities or other selves … Poetry may take the form of merely stating the nature of the conflict between these interests … it may be a temporary relief.”67
In his extension of the relevance of the conflict theory into his definition of the seventh type of ambiguity, Empson contradicts his observation in Chapter Three that “it is especially to generalised ambiguity of the third type that this rather limited formula will apply.”68 Furthermore, the limit that encumbers the theory is differently conceived here: it is not the conflict theory as formula that is limited but rather the field covered by ambiguity of the seventh type. The seventh type of ambiguity can no more be found everywhere than the third type of ambiguity can be found everywhere, but it begins to look as though a direct or indirect conversation with Graves about conflict can be found virtually everywhere in Seven Types of Ambiguity. As the chapter on the sixth type of ambiguity begins, for instance, Empson observes of one of his first examples that “contradiction as to the apparent subject of the statement seems very complete … But it cannot be said to represent a conflict in the author’s mind.”69 Clearly, he continues to work out his own theory with reference to Graves’s.
Recalling that he explained to Riding that “the Conflict Theory of poetry” was “the necessary theory for a theory of poetical ambiguity,” one can see that Empson was led to explore the roots of conflict in the nature of language itself, whether that of Ancient Egypt, that of the English Renaissance or that of contemporary poetry.70 As he says in Chapter Two, “some readers of this chapter … will have felt that it casts a new light on the very nature of language.”71 And so the influence of Graves’s conflict theory extends from the beginning to the end of Seven Types of Ambiguity.
1 Robert Graves, letter to Martin Seymour-Smith (1944), quoted in Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995), 147.
2 John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 217. The article that Haffenden refers to is William Empson, “Curds and Whey,” The Granta (11 May 1928): 419.
3 Haffenden, William Empson, 217.
4 Robert Graves, Impenetrability; or the Proper Habit of English (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926), 55–6; Empson quotes this very passage in his letter to Riding of 25 August 1970 in justification of his assertion that Graves had reached “a theory of poetical ambiguity” by 1926; see Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 429.
5 Graves, Impenetrability, 58–9.
6 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 33–4, 31, 33, 33, 31.
7 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 23.
8 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), 197.
9 Ibid., 197.
10 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1953; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 113, note.
11 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed., xiv.
12 Ibid. The full quotation reads as follows: “Mr. Robert Graves (I ought to say in passing that he is, so far as I know, the inventor of the method of analysis I was using here) 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.”
13 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 3.
14 Ibid., 255.
15 Ibid., 255, 263, 263.
16 Ibid., 30.
17 Empson, letter to Riding (25 August 1970), Selected Letters, 430.
18 Empson, quoted by Haffenden, Selected Letters, 431n10.
19 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142.
20 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 82.
21 Haffenden, William Empson, 228.
22 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 241.
23 Graves, On English Poetry, 123–4.
24 Ibid., 123, 123, 124.
25 Haffenden, William Empson, 228.
26 Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 19–20. See W.H.R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920) and W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1923).
27 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 23.
28 Ibid., 90.
29 Ibid.
30 Haffenden, William Empson, 228, 229.
31 Graves, On English Poetry, 22.
32 Ibid., 13.
33 Ibid., 13, 13, 13, 85.
34 Graves, Poetic Unreason, xi.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 1–2.
37 Ibid., 2.
38 Ibid., 2, 3.
39 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 73.
40 See Empson, letter to Riding (29 April 1971), Selected Letters, 434.
41 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142.
42 Ibid., emphasis added.
43 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xiii.
44 Graves, On English Poetry, 22, 18, 17.
45 Empson, letter to Riding (25 August 1970), Selected Letters, 428–9.
46 Ibid., 430.
47 Ibid.
48 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 1.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 2, emphasis added.
51 Favell Lee Mortimer, Reading without Tears, or A Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read (London: Hatchard and Company, 1866).
52 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142, 142, 142, 130, 144–5.
53 Ibid., 145.
54 Ibid., 145, 146.
55 Ibid., 146.
56 Ibid., 168.
57 Ibid., 146–7.
58 Ibid., 244.
59 Ibid., 147.
60 Ibid., 284.
61 Ibid, 287.
62 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 2; Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 287.
63 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 244.
64 Ibid., 244, 246, 248.
65 Ibid., 245–6.
66 Ibid., 286.
67 Graves, On English Poetry, 13; Graves, Poetic Unreason, 1–2.
68 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142, emphasis added.
69 Ibid., 255.
70 Empson, letter to Riding (25 August 1970), Selected Letters, 429.
71 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 102.