5
For Graves, then, the necessary and inevitable discrepancy between the consciousness of the poet and the subsequent, and always larger, non-conscious experience of writing the poem (which may include the poet’s intention but also inevitably exceeds it) guarantees ambiguity. The reader (and indeed the poet himself) is left to give an account after the fact of the “invisible property-shifting” that constitutes the simultaneously continuous and non-identical nature of the relationship between the poet’s experience, the words of the poem, and the reader’s experience of the poem. In many ways, Seven Types of Ambiguity is Empson’s anatomy of this poetic property-shifting. Like Northrop Frye in his account of archetypes in Anatomy of Criticism, and like structuralist theorists after mid-century generally, Empson is less interested in a metaphysical, psychological, or neurological accounting for the patterns of semantic property-shifting that he discerns in literature than in a taxonomically exhaustive accounting of the patterns themselves. However much Graves’s conflict theory was “the necessary background for a theory of ambiguity,” perhaps the biggest nudge that Graves gave Empson came in the form of his practical criticism in support of his theory.1 Much of what we think of as Empson’s way of reading poetry is actually Graves’s way, as Empson always said and yet always managed to say quite ineffectively.
Empson was perhaps most impressed by Graves’s practical application of his “‘conflict’ theory of poetry” to readings of the conflicts at the heart of religious poetry. In fact, Empson’s appropriation of Graves’s point of view on such poetry shows how he went about the extrapolation of a systematic treatment of ambiguity from Graves’s always provocative – and sometimes outrageous – observations about how poems express conflict. It also shows the source in Graves’s work of features that Empson would use to distinguish ambiguities of the third, fourth, and seventh type.
Empson brings his analysis of ambiguity to bear on the same kind of poetry, and on many of the same poets. In due course Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks, among other American New Critics, would do the same.2 In Poetic Unreason, Graves presents Herbert’s “The Bag” as “an interesting case” of the “Jekyll and Hyde” poetry that expresses “conflicts between sub-personalities”: “Poetry of the Jekyll and Hyde variety, that is poetry where the manifest content and the latent content represent opposite sides of a conflict, finds many instances in ‘so-called’ religious poetry.”3 According to Graves, “between Jekyll and Hyde there is necessarily conflict,” and in the case of religious poetry, “The more Dr. Jekyll hates Mr. Hyde, the more frequent will be the manifestations which trouble the ecclesiastic mind, ‘Sin,’ ‘Temptation,’ ‘Hypocrisy.’”4 In Herbert’s “The Bag,” the general conflict, as in “many instances of so-called ‘religious’ poetry,” is between the sacred and the secular, the spirit and the body, divine love and earthy love; in particular, “The Divine Figure in The Bag is fused with the figure of the temptress and at the end of the poem subordinate to her, where it has distinct feminine characteristics.”5
Graves says that he puts this particularly outrageous reading of Herbert’s poem early in the book so that if readers “do not shut up Poetic Unreason at this point, they will have no occasion to do so at any later provocation.”6 Designing in all his early books to be provocative (in his “Note” prefacing On English Poetry, he indicates “that when putting a cat among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as possible”), Graves develops in his prose the same strategy developed in his talks on poetry at Oxford when he was studying there in the 1920s for his B. Litt. degree. Miranda Seymour describes a “well-attended” talk in 1922: “The talk was based on the old nursery rhyme ‘How Many Miles to Babylon?’ … He started with his theory, taken from Rivers, that all poems emerged from a state of mental conflict. He used the old rhyme to illustrate his case. The author of the poem – it is anonymous – was conjured up by him with a mass of circumstantial detail which left his audience shouting and applauding.”7 The circumstantial detail in question is information that Graves recovered from the denotations and connotations of the words of the poem and from the patterns of associations they form. Graves understands as axiomatic the principle articulated a generation later by Wimsatt and Beardsley: “even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized).”8
A version of this talk is distilled into a dialogue between Graves and a “Friend” ( “a synthetic version of conversations on the same subject with several friends, English and American”) published first as an essay in The Spectator in July of 1922 and then as part of the first essay of Poetic Unreason: the essay that Empson recalls in his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity (in fact, the dialogue begins on the very page from which Empson quotes Graves).9 The nursery rhyme runs as follows:
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.10
Crafting an imaginary Socratic dialogue out of the various talks about “How Many Miles to Babylon?” that he gave in the early 1920s, Graves argues that at the heart of the poem is “the old dialogue … between body and soul” evoked, on the one hand, by a contrast between “innocence, as expressed in ‘candlelight,’” and the Biblical association of Babylon with magnificence, exile, and “world, flesh and devil,” and, on the other hand, by a contrast between the child and the adult, linked by Biblical association of the phrase “threescore and ten” with the length in years of a human life. And so, “It is a dialogue, the man who has gone astray after the lusts of the world, addressing a child who lies innocently in bed. When the child asks the question, the man feels that, in spite of the child’s apparent helplessness and ignorance of the determinate side of life, he himself, with all his strength and worldly wisdom, is far inferior in power to the child … ‘Keep innocency,’ it preaches, ‘and you can pass through the Babylon of manhood, and return safe and sound with as much ease as in childhood you visited that magnificent city in your dreams and came back before the candle had burned to its socket.’”11
Could the original version of the rhyme have used the word “Babyland” instead of “Babylon,” the similarity of their sound leading through the oral tradition to the corruption of the one into the other? No: “That Babylon is the original version seems proved by the interaction of the other symbols too closely for coincidence.”12 Will the Biblical associations of “Babylon, candlelight, and threescore and ten” prompt the same associations in everyone?13 No: “As there are degrees of implication, so there are degrees of perception. There is a common core of experience, certainly, but each individual has, for instance, different personal associations with candlelight, which alter the force of the conflict, whether the candle is thought of more particularly as a friendly charm against darkness, or whether the short flickering life of the candle may associate itself more nearly with the threescore and ten idea.”14
The talk at Oxford and the synthesized conversation in Poetic Unreason contain the essence of Graves’s theory and practice. Perhaps had this sophisticated analysis not focused on a nursery rhyme, Empson might have cited it, rather than the study of Shakespeare’s sonnet, as the source of his method. Certainly he seems to have noticed it, since he begins his most important chapter (on the second type of ambiguity) with the same strategy: showing how an apparently simple poem may in fact be extraordinarily complex. He quotes an anonymous poem:
Cupid is winged and doth range;
Her country so my love doth change.
But change she earth, or change she sky,
Yet I will lover her till I die.
How many ways are there of reading the ambiguities here?
I will love her though she moves from this part of the earth to one out of reach; I will love her though she goes to live under different skies; I will love her though she moves from this earth and sky to another planet; I will love her though she moves into a social or intellectual sphere where I cannot follow; I will love her though she alters the earth and sky I have got now, though she destroys the bubble of worship in which I am now living by showing herself unworthy to be its object; I will love her though, being yet worthy of it, by going away she changes my earth into desire and unrest, and my heaven into despair; I will love her even if she has both power and will to upset both the orderly ideals of men in general (heaven), and the system of society in general (earth); she may alter the earth and the sky she has now by abandoning her faith or in just punishment becoming outcast, and still I will love her; she may change my earth by killing me, but till it comes I will go on loving.15
Anticipating objections that he should derive such complex meaning from so simple a poem, Empson says: “This may look as if I were merely writing down different sorts of change, which would not, of course, show direct ambiguity; but change may mean ‘move to another’ or ‘alter the one you have got,’ and earth may be the lady’s private world, or the poet’s, or that of mankind at large. All meanings to be extracted from these are the immediate meaning insisted upon by the words, and yet the whole charm of the poem is its extravagant, its unreasonable, simplicity.”16 He plays the same game as Graves, for the same effect.
Although friends agreeing that “How Many Miles to Babylon?” is a good poem can initially offer no explanation of its merits beyond the fact that “it’s so simple,” Graves can show them a pattern underneath the surface of the poem that persuades them otherwise: “I invariably found that when I asked people to think of this poem as composed of a number of linked ideas reconciled in a common symbolism, so as to be emotionally felt but not intellectually classified by the reader, they admitted that … it was a poem of extraordinary subtle and condensed argument.”17 Just like Empson, that is, Graves claims to be revealing in his practical literary criticism the actual associations made unconsciously by properly qualified readers of poetry.
In terms of Graves’s cat-and-pigeons figure, the cat is his conflict theory, suspect because of its descent from the ostensibly “scientific assumptions” of psychological theories by Freud and Rivers, causing outrage because promulgated by occasional “overstatements”; the pigeons are “literary enthusiasts” who “seem to regard poetry as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to analyze.”18 Not everyone in his audience, in other words, applauded Graves when he interpreted literature by means of his conflict theory. In Tom Matthews’s account of the reaction of those who attended Graves’s Oxford talks, for instance, the dons resent Graves’s blasphemous accounts of canonized poetic miracles:
[The] moment he stopped, they were on him. His first attacker was an older man, evidently one of a strong scatteration of dons among us. This academic, in a voice of mingled scorn and fury, wished Mr. Graves to enlighten us, if he would be so kind, on the conflict in Tennyson’s mind which produced “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Mr. Graves did so – to general applause, if not to the satisfaction of his questioner. “The Sinking of the Royal George”? “Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright”? Kipling? Eyes rolling with mischief, smiling almost apologetically, Graves fielded these hard-hit questions with deft ease, and no runs were scored by the other side. This was a game at which he excelled any of his present competitors, and it was a pleasure to watch him play.19
Graves alludes to this “game” that he plays at such talks in his discussion of other religious poems in Poetic Unreason:
I was challenged recently to say how far the religious poetry of Francis Thompson was of this Jekyll and Hyde variety … I answered that Love in Dian’s Lap was applicable to more poems than the heading covers, and that where Thompson writes “The Blessed Virgin” we know that she has a human prototype … I was next particularly asked, “What about the Hound of Heaven?” I had not considered the question, but going home and re-reading the poem, I found Love in Dian’s Lap written large across it … I gave this analysis to my objector who accepted it, or said he did, but further asked me, “What about Thompson’s address to the dead Cardinal?” I said that the position there is much more painful because there is no solution to the trouble, which appears to be a later phase of The Hound of Heaven conflict.20
Because of the books that he was publishing, Graves’s standing amongst those interested in literary theory in the 1920s was high, yet his performances not just at Oxford but also as far afield as the University of Leeds also helped to spread his fame. Years later, when Richards, recalling his first conversation with Empson about A Survey of Modernist Poetry, refers to “the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves were playing with the unpunctuated form of ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’” it is easy to assume that he is being dismissive of their method as mere games-playing, just as he is dismissive in Principles of Literary Criticism of what he characterizes as Graves’s Freudian method.21 Yet it is also the case that anyone familiar with either Graves’s work or his reputation could quite matter-of-factly, and not necessarily insultingly (or at least not as insultingly as one might at first think), refer to Graves’s practical readings of poetry as “games of interpretation.”
Richards was dismissive of Graves’s games of interpretation, and he was clearly not alone in this disdain. Graves himself recognized the offence that his readings could occasion: “In writing this of Thompson I hope that I am not giving offence to such of his friends as survive, and will be grateful for any fresh evidence either for or against my view; but I protest that I have not written lightly or without much more detailed research than I have given proof of here.”22 His cat, then, is not always “as large a cat as possible,” but only because some of the pigeons were friends, or friends of friends, whose feathers he did not want to ruffle over-much.23 Graves hastens to reassure readers that he speculates only about Herbert’s dream life, not his actual sex life: “I want to emphasize that I do not think that the context that gave rise to the poem could have been a direct encounter with the temptress whom I postulate.”24 Instead, Graves presents the fusion of the divine figure and the figure of the temptress “on the analogy of St. Theresa’s visions and a great many other similar records of dreams.”25
According to Graves, the first eight lines of Herbert’s poem are ecclesiastically circumspect, but thereafter there is a pattern of sexual allusion beneath the story of the life of Jesus. In the surface story, Jesus leaves his heavenly home, along the way removing his “azure mantle” and “robes of glorie,” finally “undressing all the way,” to “repair unto an inne,” where he declares that his “doore / Shall still be open,” and that he will be listening so intently within his room that “Sighs will convey / anything to me.”26 Graves identifies a subtext about prostitution, which he presents “in the form of a story of what I am convinced occurred, filling in the bare outline with lively trifles of my own invention” (the invention consisting of Graves’s imagining Herbert in a dream conversing with his friend John Donne, once the rakish Jack Donne but “now a reformed character,” who recounts his experience of having been solicited by a prostitute in “a low tavern in Penny-Farthing Lane”): “I had retired to my chamber … and was now abed and dozing to sleep, when behold the door opens, and in walks a blue mantled wench. As one who cannot believe his eyes I watched her disrobe and set her clothes neatly upon this chair and that … ‘I am a minister of Christ,’ I began … [S] he went at last, but first she said, ‘Man of God, mine is the room lying opposite, and the door is ajar. If you repent your unkindness, I shall hear you sigh and be with you again.’”27 According to Graves, “the first stanza of the piece and the next two lines is a chapter of the Jekyll life of Herbert the saint, the remainder of the piece is a chapter of the Hyde life of Herbert the sinner.”28
Graves’s other examples of Jekyll and Hyde religious poetry make the same point about the split in the author’s mind that such poetry reveals. He offers a medieval example:
It is customary for modern writers to eulogize the religious lyrics of the Middle Ages as being so full of true religious passion that they are almost erotic. This is a queer way of putting it. A poem like that of the medieval Irish nun beginning:
Jesukin, my Jesukin,
Dwells my little cell within.
What were wealth of clerics high?
All is lie, but Jesukin.
denotes a positive rebellion in phantasy against the formal system of abstinence to which her life is devoted and a hankering after a lover and child.29
There is also “the curious contrary case to The Bag … that of Burns’ ballad John Barleycorn.”30 Ostensibly “a simple allegory of very easily discernible meaning” (the life and death of John Barleycorn corresponds “with the history of the planting and reaping of barley and its distillation and eventual appearance in the tavern as whiskey”), the poem’s “allegorical symbolism goes a little queer,” according to Graves, and so reveals “a second allegory working beneath.”31 In this second allegory, “from the beginning to the end, but in the haphazard order of events which one is accustomed to find in allegorical dreams … the allusions are appropriate to the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”32 Burns’s conscious interest being the whiskey, his submerged interest being the Gospels, “here it is Jekyll who is recessive and Hyde who is dominant.”33 Faced with Allen Upward’s suggestion that “it is most improbable that Burns had the Gospels in his mind” when he wrote the poem and that one must therefore postulate a race memory such as that outlined in The Golden Bough to account for the religious dimensions of the poem, Graves disagrees: “The conflict theory accounts for the unwitting interweaving of religion with praise of drink, and if details of the Gospels are enough to account for the form John Barleycorn has taken, it is not necessary to postulate a racial memory which can store up such close ceremonial detail through the centuries.”34 For Graves, Burns’s nonconscious activity suffices to explain the continuity within the discrepancy in “John Barleycorn” between the “deliberate poetic allegory” and the “unwitting uprush of inspired poetry.”35
On a number of occasions, and at considerable length, and in connection with several types of ambiguity, Empson presents religious poetry – primarily that of Nashe, Richard Crashaw, and Herbert – in precisely these terms. Although it is in reference to the pun as an example of verbal ambiguity of the third type that Empson promises that he will discuss the “self-consciousness” of the puns “among the seventeenth-century mystics who stress the conscious will,” it is in fact not until he turns from discussion of ambiguity of the third type “as a verbal matter” to discussion of “ambiguity of the third type … as a matter concerning whole states of mind” that he actually discusses these poets.36 It is the conflict in their psyche that is revealed by the conflict in the meanings of their words that really interests him.
Of this ambiguity Empson says:
one might call this a general ambiguity of the third type … what is said is valid in, refers to, several different topics, several universes of discourse, several modes of judgment or of feeling … It may make a single statement and imply various situations to which it is relevant; thus I should call it an ambiguity of this type when an allegory is felt to have many levels of interpretation; or it may describe two situations and leave the reader to infer various things which can be said about both of them; thus I should call it an ambiguity of this type when an ornamental comparison is not merely using one thing to illustrate another, but is interested in two things at once, and is making them illustrate one another mutually.37
Empson explains that “Herbert and the devotional poets … use a conceit to diffuse the interest back on to a whole body of experience, whose parts are supposed eventually reconcilable with one another; and the reader must pause after each display of wit to allow the various moods in which it could be read, the various situations to which it could refer, to sink into his mind.”38
We are in Graves’s territory again, as Empson acknowledges when he suggests that “it is especially to generalised ambiguity of the third type that … [the] rather limited formula” of a certain “variety of the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry … will apply.”39 According to Empson, Herbert is the type of poet who is able to be “several sorts of men at once,” able to “reconcile his tribe in his own person.”40 The reader must pause to allow the various relevant moods and situations to sink into his mind because “the mind has compartments holding opinions and modes of judgment that conflict when they come together … and one is particularly conscious of anything that mixes them up.”41 Compartments of the mind in conflict versus sub-personalities in conflict: where is the difference?
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Empson’s central concern in this analysis is not the ambiguous potential of the pun, but rather the ambiguous potential of allegory. On the one hand, “it is not, of course, the normal use of allegory to make a statement which is intended to have several interpretations. The normal use is to tell a homely story and make clear that it means something else … so that there is only one real meaning, which the first meaning is frankly a device to convey.”42 This is what Graves means by “a deliberate poetic allegory in the established tradition,” and it is precisely the possibility of deliberately predicting or intending one real meaning, effectively constraining poetry to one real meaning, that he denies. Graves suggests that without ambiguous potential, allegory is not poetry. Empson implicitly agrees, given the examples of allegory that he discusses, but he also explains that he finds two ambiguous potentialities in allegory: the first, although “not, of course, the normal use of allegory,” by means of “a statement which is intended to have several interpretations,” and the second, according to a footnote added to the second edition, by means of “effects which are undoubtedly ambiguous” even in the absence of a statement intended to have several interpretations.43
In fact, Empson’s understanding of “ambiguity of the third type … as a matter concerning whole states of mind” “when an allegory is felt to have many levels of interpretation” can be seen to have been inspired by Graves’s observations in The Meaning of Dreams about the nature of romantic allegory. Noting that to say “that La Belle Dame is a symbol of death by consumption” and “To say that La Belle Dame is at the same time symbolic of the Fanny Brawne affair is likely to offend the logically minded,” Graves explains that “the double allegory is extremely common in Romantic Poetry, occurring when two conflicts are in progress at the same time in the poet’s mind and are closely bound up with and aggravating each other.”44
So of course Empson acknowledges that “it is especially to generalised ambiguity of the third type” that the “rather limited formula” of “the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry” will apply, for Empson’s definition of generalised ambiguity of the third type descends from Graves’s practical criticism of romantic allegory.
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As we have seen, in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, whether the conflict between the “arrogant exaltation of the mystic” and the “terror of the natural man at … the approach of death” eventuates in the “Christian fusion of these two elements into … humility” is unclear.45 The poem might offer two apparently unconnected meanings that the poet self-consciously presents “in one word simultaneously,” alternative meanings that “combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author,” or a full contradiction that marks “a fundamental division in the writer’s mind” (ambiguities of types three, four, and seven, respectively), but at the heart remains the fundamental conflict in these Christian poets between the spirit and the body, the question being to what extent the poet is conscious of these ambiguities and in control of their presentation.46
For a clearer example of type-three ambiguity, therefore, Empson turns to Crashaw’s “Caritas Nimia,” a poem “strictly of the type in question”: “Sacred and profane love (in a devotional setting which would consider them very different) are seen as one.”47 According to Empson, Crashaw understands that he engineers a mutual comparison between different kinds of love ( “he is well enough aware that they belong to different worlds”): “In this case, though not always in Crashawe, it seems a matter of conscious ingenuity and artifice that Cupid and the love of Christ should so firmly be used to interpret one another.”48 Empson advances Herbert’s poem “The Temple” as another poem that consciously contrasts sacred and profane love in order “to treat them as the same, or to explain one by the other.”49 As he explains in a note to the revised edition of 1947, “Herbert keeps the symbols apart with the full breadth of the technique of allegory; though the contrast in question is the same as that of the Crashaw example.”50 In this kind of devotional verse, recourse to allegory is a sign of the poet’s awareness of the differences between the kinds of love that the poem involves.
Insofar as he accepts that “the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry” applies to religious poetry, Empson accepts that Crashaw and Herbert are able to “be several sorts of men at once” – in this case, saint and sinner – and that they are aware of being both, reconciling in their poems the reconciliation in their persons of these two ways of life.51 Yet Empson’s phrase, “seems a matter of conscious ingenuity” (emphasis added), on the one hand, and his later confession in a note to the 1947 edition regarding “The Temple” ( “I am not sure that Herbert did not mean the poem dramatically as said by a foolish character”), on the other hand, show once again that Empson remains unconvinced that ambiguity can be predicted or constrained by the deliberating consciousness of either poet or reader.52
As with Crashaw, so with Herbert: it is not always the case that he consciously uses sacred and profane love to interpret each other. In a verse from Herbert’s “Pilgrimage,” Empson finds ambiguity of the third type because in juxtaposing angels as coins and angels as messengers of God “its methods, allegory and the overt pun, are the most conscious of all devices to produce ambiguity.” He has evidence that Herbert is self-consciously determined to “reconcile his tribe in his own person,” yet he admits that it is also the case that “the various meanings are felt as a coherent unit,” suggesting that “we have thus practically arrived already at the fourth type, in which the ambiguity is less conscious, because more completely accepted, or fitted into a larger unit.”53
This transition from ambiguity of type three to ambiguity of type four is explained by Graves: “Hyde and Jekyll co-exist in an individual as possibilities, but in relation to any given situation only one will appear at a time while the conflict continues. If a situation occurs in which they can sink their differences, the action of the individual will be neither Hyde-ish nor Jekyllesque but of such a nature thereafter Hyde will no longer be Hyde or Jekyll, Jekyll, but a single individual will emerge not predominantly Jekyll or Hyde, or merely Jekyll plus Hyde, but a new creation making the continuance of the conflicting elements unnecessary.”54 So it would seem that a certain variety of the conflict theory of poetry applies equally “especially” to ambiguity of the fourth type: a “less conscious,” “more completely accepted” ambiguity, an ambiguity “fitted into a larger unit.”55
Graves says of this variety of conflict just what Empson says of seventh-type ambiguity:
What has happened in poetry where there is disagreement between manifest statement and latent content seems to be this, then: that on the intellectual level either Jekyll or Hyde has already, before the poem appears, expressed an objection to the other or acted against his interests; on the emotional level that position is reversed; when the poem appears there is an outburst in symbolism against the victor. When this outburst now recorded on paper is referred to the intellectual level, in which the position is still unfavourable to the party employing the symbolism, there is no understanding on the part of the victor for the complaints of his opponent in the emotional mode, but the victor either interprets the symbolism in a sense pleasing to himself or views the poem as impersonal and inspired and has at any rate no conflict with it.56
Similarly, Empson says that in “cases of ambiguity of the seventh type … the ideas are no longer thought of as contradictory by the author, or if so, then only from a stylistic point of view; he has no doubt that they can be reconciled, and that he is stating their reconciliation.”57
Graves says of the “Jekyll life” and the “Hyde life” that “neither of these conflicting lives has any respect for the rights of the other,” and suggests with regard to the dream that he imagines as inspiring “The Bag” that “if Herbert had understood his dream he would have called his Hyde a blasphemer of the most abandoned character.”58 Herbert’s not understanding the conflict between his sub-personalities is a necessary feature of this poem, for just as “direct solicitation” in “a direct encounter with the temptress” in question “would have been sternly met by the good man and the poem would have taken another form,” so the poem would have taken another form “if Herbert had understood his dream.”59 Empson’s point about the contradiction in Nashe’s poem between “the fear of death and the hope of glory” is the same: “you may say … that the humility of the last line … 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” – making the poem an example of the same seventh type of ambiguity as found in Herbert’s poem “The Sacrifice.”60
Empson agrees with Graves about the psychological preconditions necessary for such conflicted poetry: “necessary if so high a degree of ambiguity is to seem normal” to the poet is the “releasing and reassuring condition” “in which the theological system is accepted so completely that the poet is only its mouthpiece.”61 Another device of “incidental convenience” toward this end is allegory: “In devotional verse it is often used … to impose calm on the writer and allow him to evade his own habits of reticence; almost all sexual language, too … is a hierarchy of devices of this kind.”62
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One can also detect the influence of Graves – no doubt reinforced by the example of Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry – in Empson’s readiness to ascribe a persona to the speaking voice in a poem somewhat different from, and perhaps quite contradictory of, the voice associated with the known personality of the poet. Just as Riding and Graves acknowledge that the anti-Jewish prejudice in “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” may or may not belong to Eliot, but assuredly belongs to a point of view expressed in the poem, so Empson insists that in Herbert’s poem “The Temple” there is a point of view from which someone can be seen (in the last line, “I did expect a ring”) to express the expectation of receiving “the halo of a saint”: “Herbert would not have meant that he himself expected the halo of a saint … And yet after all, though I want to give full weight to this point of view [that the expected ring suggests “the perfect figure of Heaven or of eternity, marriage with God, or a halo,”] I am not sure that Herbert did not mean the poem dramatically as said by a foolish character, so that the halo could poke up its head quite prominently.”63 As we have seen, Empson implies the same question about the relationship between the poet and the speaking persona in eighteenth-century poetry generally, and between Doctor Johnson himself and his literary personae particularly.
Graves regularly presents his readings of poems in terms of the dialogues between conflicting points of view that he perceives within them. And so when Empson concludes his discussion of whether the last verse of Nashe’s poem represents ambiguity of type three or type four, or even type seven, with the observation that he regards it as an example of the third type of ambiguity because he “cannot forget the difference” between the three “modes of feeling” and so finds that he must “read it aloud ‘dramatically,’ as a dialogue between three moods,” one is tempted to conclude that he has been inspired in myriad ways by his reading of Graves’s early work.64 For Empson to read poetry out loud to himself as a dialogue between the poet’s moods is clearly to follow the example of Graves in his paraphrasing of religious poems as sometimes outrageous dialogues between the poet’s spiritual and sexual moods.
In defining ambiguity of the seventh type, Empson shows that he has paid close attention not just to Graves’s speculations about the conflicted inner dialogues of religious poets but also to his speculations about the conflicted inner dialogues suggested by Keats’s poetry. Empson explains that “an example of the seventh type of ambiguity … 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 writer’s mind.”65 The point of Graves’s analysis of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is to show such a division in Keats’s mind: “The Merciless Lady … represents both the love that he feared and the death that he feared.”66 In fact, Graves affirms, “I know of no poem in any language which is … apparently simple and even conventional … yet opens up longer vistas of torment and horror and self-reproach and despair. Anyone can see that the restlessness of the poet’s mind in a setting of this sort makes it impossible for him to marshal his feelings carefully and fully and logically; his agony if it ever finds expression beyond a beating of the breast and a tearing of the hair will use phrases of the most condensed and perverse imagery … If La Belle Dame had not been bound by Keats’ regard for the poetic conventions of the men he admired … the whole thing might have appeared as a confused and disintegrated nightmare.”67
Empson accepts Keats’s mind as a good example of the divided mind, and finds in poetry from “St Agnes’ Eve” to “Ode on Melancholy” that Keats uses “ambiguities of this type to convey a dissolution of normal experience into intensity of sensation.”68 To illustrate his point, Empson provides an extensive analysis of “Ode on Melancholy.” In this analysis, he duplicates the points made in Graves’s analysis of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” in On English Poetry.
Graves presents the poem as an expression of “suppressed emotional conflict”: Keats’s “growing passion for … Fanny Brawne … comes into conflict with the apprehension, not yet a certainty, of his own destined death from consumption, so that the merciless Lady, to put it baldly, represents both the woman he loved and the death he feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his poetry and the death that would cut his poetry short.”69 In The Meaning of Dreams, Graves expands his analysis to include the suggestion that “La Belle Dame may represent also the figure of poetry … [T] he close connection of this conflict of poetic ambition on the one hand and the inability to write on the other, with the Fanny Brawne conflict and the Death by Disease conflict can be clearly shown.”70 Graves presents evidence for his biographical assumptions from Sidney Colvin’s Life of Keats, Rossetti’s Life, and Keats’s own letters to his brother George. His purpose is to suggest “the peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry.”71 Comparing “Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny as he first knew her with the lady of the poem” leads Graves to wonder whether a biographical incident can account for the multiple meanings in the poem: “did the natural thinness and paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face form the association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the real reason of the ‘kisses four’? Was it not perhaps four because of the painful doubleness of the tragic vision – was it extravagant to suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the eyes of death?”72 To paraphrase Empson, Graves is attempting by such psycho-biographical analysis to trace the verbal path by which one of Keats’s experiences dissolves into the multiple intensities of sensation that is the poem.
Empson identifies the same multiple meanings in “Ode on Melancholy”: “Opposite notions combined in this poem include death and the sexual act … the conception of the woman as at once mistress and mother, at once soothing and exciting, whom one must master, to whom one must yield; a desire at once for the eternity of fame and for the irresponsibility of oblivion; an apprehension of ideal beauty as sensual; and an apprehension of eternal beauty as fleeting.”73 Of course, the terms that Graves and Empson introduce are staples in criticism of Keats. The evidence that Empson follows Graves here comes from his observation that “Biographers who attempt to show from Keats’s life how he came by these notions are excellently employed, but it is no use calling them in to explain why the poem is so universally intelligible and admired; evidently these pairs of opposites, stated in the right way, make a direct appeal to the normal habits of the mind.”74 The poet’s abnormal psyche is not necessary to explain the response to the poem by readers with normal psyches. Not only does he in a general way recall the biographical manoeuvres by Graves, but he also recalls more particularly Graves’s insistence that “for the reader, without necessarily any direct detailed regard to the history of the poet, the reading of poetry” – as it does for the poet – “enables him to be rid of … conflicts between his sub-personalities.”75
Empson and Graves both see a psychological “pattern underneath” the semantic “pattern underneath” the surface text, but Empson pays much more attention to its verbal manifestations than to its biographical source. Still, Empson incorporates into his definition of “the normal habits of the mind” a good deal of Graves’s “conflict theory.”76 Conflict theory underwrites a good deal of Empson’s concluding observation about “the most important thing about the communication of the arts”: “the way in which opposites can be stated so as to satisfy a wide variety of people, for a great number of degrees of interpretation.”77
Reconciliation of opposites, contradictions held in tension, “bearing all the elements in mind” when reading – Empson is inspired on all these fronts first by Graves, then by Riding and Graves, and on all these fronts he inspires in turn American New Critics from Ransom to Tate and Brooks.
1 Empson, letter to Laura Riding (25 August 1970), Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 429.
2 Both Tate and Brooks concentrate their attention on the conflicted poetry of John Donne. See, for instance, Allen Tate’s essays “Literature as Knowledge,” “A Note on Donne,” and “The Point of Dying: Donne’s ‘Virtuous Men,’” in Collected Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959), 16–48, 325–32, 547–52, and Cleanth Brooks’s chapters “The Language of Paradox” and “The Heresy of Paraphrase” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947; repr. New York: Harvest Books, 1975).
3 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 57, 2, 57.
4 Ibid., 51–2, 53.
5 Ibid., 57, 62.
6 Ibid., 58–9.
7 Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995), 115.
8 W.K. Wimsatt, Jr, and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 5.
9 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 31; also see Robert Graves, “How Many Miles to Babylon? An Analysis,” The Spectator, 129 (22 July 1922): 117–18.
10 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 30.
11 Ibid., 32–3.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 34.
15 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), 63.
16 Ibid., 63–4.
17 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 31.
18 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), vii–viii.
19 T.S. Matthews, Under the Influence: Recollections of Robert Graves, Laura Riding, and Friends (London: Cassell, 1977), 118.
20 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 70–1.
21 I.A. Richards, “William Empson,” Furioso, 1.3 (1940), supplement following p. 44, quoted in John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 207.
22 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 77.
23 Graves, On English Poetry, viii.
24 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 59.
25 Ibid., 58.
26 Ibid., 57–8.
27 Ibid., 58, 59, 59, 60–1
28 Ibid., 59.
29 Ibid., 69–70.
30 Ibid., 63.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 64.
33 Ibid., 63.
34 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 68–9, quoting Allen Upward, The Divine Mystery: A Reading of the History of Christianity down to the Time of Christ (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1913).
35 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 49.
36 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 132, 132, 130, 141.
37 Ibid., 141–2.
38 Ibid., 157.
39 Ibid., 142.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 144.
42 Ibid., 162.
43 Ibid., 162, 162; Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1953; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 128.
44 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 141, 142; Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 142.
45 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 146.
46 Ibid., 130, 168, 244.
47 Ibid., 147.
48 Ibid., 148.
49 Ibid.
50 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed., 118.
51 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142.
52 Ibid., 148; Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed., 119.
53 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 165, 142, 165, 166.
54 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 52.
55 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142, 166, 166, 166.
56 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 54.
57 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 284.
58 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 59.
59 Ibid.
60 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 147.
61 Ibid., 287.
62 Ibid., 163.
63 Ibid., 150; Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed., 119, 119. See also Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 240.
64 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 147.
65 Ibid., 244.
66 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 140.
67 Ibid., 144–5.
68 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 271.
69 Graves, On English Poetry, 51–2.
70 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 144.
71 Graves, On English Poetry, 54.
72 Ibid., 53–4.
73 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 272–3.
74 Ibid., 273.
75 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 2.
76 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 273.
77 Ibid., 279.