6

Defence of Poetic Analysis

One of the most interesting ways that Empson follows Graves in Seven Types of Ambiguity is his defence of the kind of detailed poetic analysis that he offers throughout the book. Before Seven Types of Ambiguity, he had published only poems and reviews in Granta and two essays carved out of the book in Experiment, so he was not answering criticism of his own practices when he took up this defence. Instead, he implicitly declares solidarity with critics who have preceded him and upon whom abuse had been heaped. He launches a pre-emptive strike against the reaction to his own work that their prior example had taught him to expect.

For example, T.S. Eliot was criticized for his overly intellectual poetry and criticism. In response to “a usual objection to what is clearly part of [his] programme for the métier of poetry … that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry),” he begins his most famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” by chastising the English nation for being “more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius” ( “we are such unconscious people” that we believe that “the French are ‘more critical’ than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous”).¹ Similarly, Graves prefaces his first book with the observation that “literary enthusiasts seem to regard poetry as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to analyse.”² In Poetic Unreason, he devotes a whole chapter, “Defence of Poetic Analysis,” to an explanation of “the strength of [his] position”: a strength that lies in the “synthesis suggested between modern analytic psychology and the reading of poetry ‘emotionally.’”³ Empson knew that he would face the usual objections to intellectual analysis of poetry, and that both his critical method and his psychological and linguistic paradigms owed so much to Graves that he would face the same objections that had already been launched against Graves’s work.

In fact, Empson follows Graves in his defence of detailed poetic analysis from his first chapter to his last. In the first, he observes that “people suspect analysis, often rightly, as the refuge of the emotionally sterile.”⁴ In the last, he points out that the emotionally sterile analyser of poetry is paralleled by the emotionally fragile appreciator of poetry: “many works of art give their public a sort of relief and strength,” so much so that “such a public cannot afford to have them analysed.”⁵ According to Empson, the sterile analyst and the fragile reader are both incompetent – because incomplete – readers of poetry: “On the face of it, there are two sorts of literary critic, the appreciative and the analytical; the difficulty is that they have all got to be both.”⁶ In reading poetry, “the act of knowing is itself an act of sympathising.”⁷ Anticipating the usual objections to erudite analysis, Empson follows Graves in attempting a synthesis between spontaneous emotional appreciation of poetry and intellectual analysis of poetry underwritten by psychological and linguistic sophistication.

Empson’s synthesis between emotion and analysis certainly maintains the psychotherapeutic dimension that Graves highlights in his conflict theory: “Many works of art give their public a sort of relief and strength, because they are independent of the moral code which their public accepts and is dependent on; relief, by fantasy gratification; strength, because it gives you a sort of equilibrium within your boundaries to have been taken outside them, however secretly, because you know your own boundaries better when you have seen them from both sides.”⁸ This point is a generalization of Graves’s description of poetry “as a record of the conflicts between various pairs of Jekyll and Hyde,” in which “the terms Jekyll and Hyde … are rather more than synonyms for ‘deliberate’ and ‘unwitting’ because Jekyll is always used in the restricted sense of action in conformity with the dominant social code of the community, while Hyde is the outlaw.”⁹

Empson seems to have been quite accurate when recollecting in the 1970s that one of the things that most interested him about Graves’s work in the 1920s was the way it introduced Freud’s concepts into literary criticism: one sees here that they both accept the Freudian parallel between dream and literature as wish-fulfilment fantasies, gratifications of socially transgressive desires that the reality principle would stifle but for the disguised expression of these desires that dream and literature afford and effect. Empson’s account of the split between poetry’s analysers and appreciators also duplicates Graves’s simple bifurcation of the mind into intellectual and emotional camps. Like Graves, Empson eschews the more sophisticated terminology and concepts of Freud’s own work for the layperson’s approach favoured by Graves in his explanation of his conflict theory. The latter suggests that “in the period of conflict, poetry may be either a partisan statement in the emotional or in the intellectual mode of thought of one side of the conflict; or else a double statement of both sides of the conflict, one side appearing in the manifest statement, that is, in the intellectual mode, the other in the latent content, that is, in the emotional mode, with neither side intelligible to the other.”¹⁰ Both are necessary: “Both modes are of equal importance since we could not do without either of them.”¹¹

Like Graves, Empson battles a bias against intellectual analysis – often a bias that amounts to no more than what he calls “a snobbery” in writer and reader.¹² He demonstrates the presence always already of emotional response in properly intellectual analysis of poetry and also the presence always already of intellectual analysis in properly emotional appreciation of poetry. In defence of analysis, he even argues that the prosaic knowledge derived from intellectual analysis can actually lead to the recovery of a form of poetic knowledge and emotional appreciation otherwise inaccessible, because the knowledge that such analysis provides is historically remote from the contemporary reader and must be recovered through scholarship and criticism: “it often happens that, for historical reasons or what not, one can no longer appreciate a thing directly by poetical knowledge, and yet can rediscover it in a more controlled form by prosaic knowledge.”¹³

Yet Graves and Empson both give the spontaneous emotional appreciation of poetry its due. Graves observes that “the generalizations of modern science … are more than usually inadequate for the analysis of poems of emotional conflict.”¹⁴ If “the rhythmic hypnotism of the verse” is not effective, or if the “symbolism” is not “intuitively understood,” then “the subject for analysis will never have been a poem.”¹⁵ Empson agrees: “so far as poetry can be regarded altogether dispassionately, so far as it is an external object for examination, it is dead poetry and not worth examining.”¹⁶ 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.”¹⁷ Empson again agrees: in reading poetry, “the act of knowing is itself an act of sympathising; unless you are enjoying the poetry you cannot create it, as poetry, in your mind.”¹⁸ Their frustration with the bias against intellectual analysis of poetry in no way reduces their respect for emotional appreciation of poetry to mere lip-service.

In respect of the “intuitively understood” poem, Graves notes that “such understanding is not capable of a scientific registration that will enable students of poetry to re-create that mood at will.”¹⁹ Empson acknowledges the same great gulf between appreciation of poetry and analysis of poetry: “An appreciator produces literary effects similar to the one he is appreciating, and sees to it … that his version is more intelligible to the readers he has in mind. Having been shown what to look for, they are intended to go back to the original and find it there for themselves … The analyst is not a teacher in this way; he assumes that something has been conveyed to the reader by the work under consideration, and sets out to explain … why the work has had the effect on him that is assumed. As an analyst he is not repeating the effect; he may even be preventing it from happening again.”²⁰

Having similarly observed that analysis “often destroys what it pretends to explain,” Graves suggests that “this is not, however, sufficient reason for refusing to allow emotional or intellectual poetry to be scrutinized in an indirect manner.”²¹ Analysis of a poem ought to proceed “by comparing the context from which it arose with the context in which it is appreciated” – by comparing, that is, the “mood” of the reader to “the poet’s when he wrote the poem.”²² In other words, “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.”²³ Graves describes a process of getting to know a poet by intuitive appreciation or emotional sympathy, and also a process of getting to know by intellectual analysis that the appreciation or sympathy is objective. Aiming at objectivity, such analysis can never be complete and comprehensive: “The result will only be an equational outline, but without it our intellectual understanding of a poem will be limited: as limited as that of a man born blind who, gaining sight in middle age, sees movement and colour, but has no correlating power to help him distinguish visually between his best friend and a flying piece of paper.”²⁴

Empson applies all these ideas – the reader as someone getting to know a poet, the mathematical language implied by the phrase “equational outline,” and the analogy comparing the poet to a person adjusting his sight to unfamiliar, ambiguous visual stimuli – to his explanation of the reader’s experience of and response to ambiguity in the words and sentences of a poem. In any reading experience, he notes, “there is a preliminary stage of uncertainty; ‘the grammar may be of such or such a kind; the words are able to be connected in this way or that.’”²⁵ And so “a plausible grammar is picked up at the same time as the words it orders, but with a probability attached to it, and the less probable alternatives, ready, if necessary, to take its place, are in some way present at the back of your mind.”²⁶ This continually evolving equational outline of possible meanings is a psychological and linguistic constant in the reading experience generally. The reading of poetry inevitably involves the same sort of provisional syntactical, grammatical construct, but “in poetry much less stress is laid on such alternatives; ‘getting to know’ a poet is largely the business of learning to control them.”²⁷ The mind’s construction of an “equational outline” of a poem’s meaning parallels the mind’s provisional outline of a visual field: “Under some drugs that make things jump about you see any particular thing moving or placed elsewhere in proportion as it is likely to move or be placed elsewhere, in proportion to a sort of coefficient of mobility which you have already given it as part of your apprehension.”²⁸ Similarly, “to take another coefficient which the eye attaches to things, as you have an impression of a thing’s distance away, which can hardly ever be detached from the pure visual sensation, and when it is so detached leaves your eye disconcerted (if what you took for a wall turns out to be the sea, you at first see nothing, perhaps are for a short time puzzled as with a blur, and then see differently), so the reading of a new poet, or of any poetry at all, fills many readers with a sense of mere embarrassment and discomfort, like that of not knowing, and wanting to know, whether it is a wall or the sea.”²⁹

Observing that “it would seem obvious that for emotional poetry the emotional approach is the most fitting one,” Graves insists that “the understanding thereby obtained may always be broadened by subsequent intellectual analysis,” and that intellectual analysis cannot be confined to such a “subsequent” phase of the reading experience: “Complete dissociation from the manifest statement of poetry is impossible for the reader; true, he may completely mistake the outline of sense that the poem had for the poet, but even when reading dithyrambic poetry of advanced grammatical disintegration, the eye will skip and snatch at random phrases.”³⁰ Empson sees the same process of trial and error deeply embedded in the poetry reading experience of a being that thinks “not in words but in directed phrases”: “It is the faint and separate judgments of probability which unite, as if with an explosion, to ‘make sense’ and accept the main meaning of a connection of phrases.”³¹

Although he would claim to Riding in the 1970s that he was constitutionally resistant to influence – “My capacities for absorption are restricted by nature, and I know that much good work cannot enter my mind” – it is clear that he absorbed a great deal of Graves, and that the good work by Graves that enters his mind ranges from major points to minor ones.³² To correct readers who argue against intellectual analysis of poetry, for instance, Empson even takes up Graves’s use of Swinburne in the same cause. Graves complains that “the emotional approach theory is often carried so far that we hear it said that the best way to read Swinburne is to disregard the sense entirely and enjoy the glorious rush of sound and rhythm: not only does this seem hard on Swinburne, who prided himself a good deal on the thought contained in his verse, but it is a counsel reminiscent of the old catch, ‘If you can see a piebald horse and not think about its tail you can have a wish.’ Complete dissociation from the manifest statement of poetry is impossible for the reader.”³³ Empson agrees: “People are oddly determined to regard Swinburne as an exponent of Pure Sound with no intellectual content. As a matter of technique, his work is full of such dissolved and contrasted reminiscences as need to be understood; as a matter of content, his sensibility was of the intellectual sort which proceeds from a process of analysis.”³⁴

One wonders if Empson’s use of the word “reminiscences” here is merely a coincidence, or itself a reminiscence of the passage in Graves. Empson often absorbs not just Graves’s line of argument, but also his turns of phrase, metaphors, and analogies. In his defence of poetic analysis, Graves figures the poems threatened by analysis as flowers disturbed in their bed: “There has been a considerable opposition to these analyses of poetry from some of my friends who are poets by profession, and this is not only based on the fear that I or my collaborators may uncover by these means their secret sorrows or repressed vices: nor are they afraid only on my behalf, though they put it this way, that by digging too deep into the flower-bed of my mind I may turn up soil that will kill the flowers already planted; they are equally afraid on their own account that if they acquire this habit from me their occupation will be gone, their poetry will be killed.”³⁵ Empson counters the same concerns by the same figure: “critics have been perhaps too willing to insist that the operation of poetry is something magical … like the growth of a flower, which it would be folly to allow analysis to destroy by digging the roots up and crushing out the juices into the light of day … [W] hile it may be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be violated, it seems to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.”³⁶ Graves is even more confident: “if this analytic spirit is rife among the reading public, the poet must be analyst, too, and if the reader digs deep and undermines the poet, the poet must countermine even deeper … I hold that analysis so far from killing poetry gives it greater complexity, richness and, to use a metaphor from thermo-dynamics, entropy.”³⁷

His method of literary analysis fully explicated, and having proudly established his claim to be one of the critics who, “as ‘barking dogs’ … relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and … afterwards scratch it up,” Empson revisits this question of the relationship between analysis, on the one hand, and poetic inspiration and craft, on the other, in his concluding chapter:

An ambiguity … is not satisfying in itself, nor is it, considered as a device on its own, a thing to be attempted; it must in each case arise from, and be justified by, the peculiar requirements of the situation. On the other hand, it is a thing which the more interesting and valuable situations are more likely to justify. Thus the practice of “trying not to be ambiguous” has a great deal to be said for it … it is a necessary safeguard against being ambiguous without proper occasion, and it leads to more serious ambiguities when such occasions arise. But, of course, the phrase “trying not to be ambiguous” is itself very indefinite and treacherous; it involves problems of all kinds as to what a poet can try to do, how much of his activity he is conscious of, and how much of his activity he could become conscious of if he tried.³⁸

Here Empson channels Graves’s concerns about the impact of analysis of the poet’s conflicts upon the poet’s own creativity and the question of just how much of his poetic activity the poet can be conscious of. In the essay Empson cites in his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Graves emphasizes that “the poet never knows what he is going to write, and very seldom can give a rational account of what he has written even after a long time.”³⁹ The question immediately arises as to the impact upon what the poet is going to write of a rational outline of his poetry – whether his poetry in prospect, or his poetry in retrospect. On the one hand, “No poet, a Dante even or a Virgil, composing pen in hand knows before he writes exactly the form that his carefully prepared scheme will take; and that is why after giving a full account in conversation with a friend of the poem he intends to write, the poem is impossible to write in that form. The knowledge of the outline has started a new phase of the story … so either the scheme is abandoned altogether … or it takes a step forward and becomes much more significant and exciting.”⁴⁰ The case is the same with respect to analysis of a poet’s work: “Poetry contains a record of the fears, the aspirations and the philosophy of a poet’s other selves, and any knowledge gained by analysis of this record will be helpful to him in future writing. When such analysis is possible the resultant knowledge will not bring a complete end of all conflict … As a result of the analysis there will be a renewed working of conflict, translated eventually into poetry of a very different character from what passed before.”⁴¹ In fact, so far as individual poets are concerned, “Analytic thought is the best preventive against writing by formula, which means only that the same conflict persists over a long period without altering its outline appreciably.”⁴² We might even expect the same effect upon poetry as a whole:

A further objection raised against poetic analysis is that “once we become conscious through analysis of the meaning of a piece of poetic symbolism, we can never again get that curious thrill which means an unconscious apprehension of a latent allegory.” But in Japanese poetry, where the latent allusory content is understood and systematized, the poetic value is found I understand in the layer of secondary allusion below the layer of which the reader is expected to have rational knowledge. A further development of poetry beyond even that secondary level may in time occur, and for this reason I hold that analysis so far from killing poetry gives it another complexity, richness.⁴³

Empson’s last paragraph in Seven Types of Ambiguity sounds a similar note in his “apology for many niggling pages”: “for those who find this book contains novelties, it will make poetry more beautiful, without their ever having to remember the novelties, or endeavour to apply them.”⁴⁴

Similarly, the “notion of unity” found in Empson’s concluding observation that “anything (phrase, sentence, or poem) meant to be considered as a unit must be unitary, must stand for a single order of mind,” develops arguments presented first by Graves, and then by Riding and Graves, concerning differences between the prose state of mind and the poetic state of mind.⁴⁵ In On English Poetry Graves argues: “Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as possible the latent association of words … In poetry … the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully … [S] tandard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people.”⁴⁶ Empson says the same thing, more temperately: “a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.”⁴⁷

Empson goes on to suggest that in “the process of apprehension, both of the poem and of its analysis … one wants as far as clarity will allow to say things in the form in which they will be remembered when properly digested.”⁴⁸ He effectively generalizes the recommendation of Riding and Graves about the way to proceed with a poem like “The Rugged Black of Anger” – the kind of poem “that really seems to mean what it says”: “All we can do is to let it interpret itself, without introducing any new associations or, if possible … without introducing any words not actually belonging to the poem, without throwing any of the poem away as superfluous padding and without having recourse to a prose version.”⁴⁹ Empson seems to agree with the principle that Riding and Graves announce: “If … the author of the lines beginning ‘The rugged black of anger’ were asked to explain their meaning, the only proper reply would be to repeat the lines, perhaps with greater emphasis.”⁵⁰ As he explains, “in so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delicacy, or compression of thought … it is to be respected (in so far, one is tempted to say, as the same thing could not have been said so effectively without it, but, of course, in poetry the same thing could never have been said in any other way).”⁵¹

Riding and Graves understand themselves to be countering the prevailing assumption among critics and readers “that prose ideas have their exact equivalents in poetry,” and that the “categories representing the stages of the poem from creation to criticism” trace, first, a process from the “Poet’s prose idea” to the “Poem” and, second, a process from the “Poem” to the “Reader’s prose summary” (except in the case of modern poetry, where “the real poem, apparently unwritten,” is “suppressed,” replaced by the “Prose idea as poem,” eventuating in the “Reader’s poetical summary” of the latter).⁵² They insist that in this approach to the interpretation of poetry, we have between “the poem as it stands” and the reader’s “summary” of it “not two equivalent meanings but one meaning and another gratuitous meaning derived from it.”⁵³ There is a “discrepancy,” for there is “an insurmountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts.”⁵⁴

In explaining why apprehension of the poem requires that “one … say things in the form in which they will be remembered when properly digested,” Empson makes the same point about the discrepancy between, on the one hand, “detailed analysis” of facts and judgements, and on the other, the complex unified feeling prompted by reading poetry:

People remember a complex notion as a sort of feeling that involves facts and judgments; one cannot give or state the feeling directly … But to state the fact and the judgment (the thought and the feeling) separately, as two different relevant matters, is a bad way of suggesting how they are combined; it makes the reader apprehend as two things what he must, in fact, apprehend as one thing … This notion of unity is of peculiar importance … [T] o say a thing in two parts is different in incalculable ways from saying it as a unit … When you are holding a variety of things in your mind, or using for a single matter a variety of intellectual machinery, the only way of applying all your criteria is to apply them simultaneously; the only way of forcing your reader to grasp your total meaning is to arrange that he can only feel satisfied if he is bearing all the elements in mind at the moment of conviction; the only way of not giving something heterogenous is to give something which is at every point a compound.⁵⁵

He develops here a view of the poem as self-contained whole elaborated by Riding and Graves. The poem that “really seems to mean what it says,” they say, should be “complete without criticism.”⁵⁶ In fact, “without the addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral interpretations,” the poem should “reveal an internal consistency strengthened at every point in its development.”⁵⁷ For the reader to read “with a slowness proportionate to how much he is not a poet … is one way of getting out of the prose and into the poetic state of mind, of developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all there is to see at a given point and taking it all along with one as one goes along.”⁵⁸

According to Riding and Graves, the poem’s “internal consistency strengthened at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external application” establishes the “insurmountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts,” indicating “the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practical workaday reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts.”⁵⁹ Empson makes the same distinction between poetical and prosaic facts and ideas:

You may know what it will be satisfying to do for the moment; precisely how you are feeling; how to express the thing conceived clearly, but alone, in your mind. That, in its appreciation of, and dependence on, the immediate object or state of mind, is poetical knowledge … You may, on the other hand, be able to put the object known into a field of similar objects, in some order … you may know several ways of getting to the thing, other things like it but different … the thing can be said to your neighbours, and has enough valencies in your mind for it to be connected with a variety of other things into a variety of different classes. That, from its administrative point of view, from its desire to put the thing known into a coherent structure, is prosaic knowledge. Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.⁶⁰

Riding and Graves make these distinctions before Empson takes them up, and Riding would go on to hammer away at them in Contemporaries and Snobs and Anarchism Is Not Enough well before Empson started the first chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity. But the first to make these points, and to do so in defence of poetic analysis, was Graves alone.

Thinking of Graves more as a mentor than as a rival, and regarding him less as a contemporary than as a precursor (one who worked out the relevance of Freud for literary criticism “a generation before me,” he recalled), Empson positions himself as successor to Graves in the contest with what the latter called the “literary enthusiasts” who “seem to regard poetry as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to analyse.”⁶¹ Assuming his mentor’s mantle, with more than double portion of his art, Empson self-consciously applies Graves’s method and brings his own artillery to bear in defence of poetic analysis.

1 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. enlarged (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 16, 13, 13, 13.

2 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.

3 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), ix.

4 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), 21.

5 Ibid., 312.

6 Ibid., 315–16.

7 Ibid., 315.

8 Ibid., 312.

9 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 52–3.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 56.

12 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 318.

13 Ibid., 320.

14 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 92.

15 Ibid.

16 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 314.

17 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 92.

18 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 315.

19 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 92–3.

20 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 316.

21 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 92, 93.

22 Ibid., 93, 92, 92.

23 Ibid., 93.

24 Ibid.

25 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 303.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 94–5.

31 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 303, 303–4.

32 Empson, letter to Laura Riding (29 April 1971), Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 432–3.

33 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 94.

34 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 207–8.

35 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 78.

36 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 12.

37 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 78–82.

38 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 12, 297–8.

39 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 16.

40 Ibid., 25–6.

41 Ibid., 78–9.

42 Ibid., 79.

43 Ibid., 81–2.

44 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 256.

45 Ibid., 296, 302.

46 Graves, On English Poetry, 14.

47 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 319.

48 Ibid., 301.

49 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 147–8.

50 Ibid., 143.

51 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 202.

52 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 144.

53 Ibid., 145.

54 Ibid., 145, 146.

55 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 302.

56 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 147, 146.

57 Ibid., 146.

58 Ibid., 149.

59 Ibid., 146.

60 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 319.

61 Empson, quoted by Haffenden, Selected Letters, 431n10; Graves, On English Poetry, vii, vii–viii.