7
So thoroughly does Empson absorb Graves’s early work that this influence can even be found complicating his account of the failings of nineteenth-century poetry. According to Eliot, whereas the metaphysical poets were “constantly amalgamating disparate experience,” “trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling,” for a “thought to Donne was an experience,” it seems “something … happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne … and the time of Tennyson and Browning,” for the latter “do not feel their thought.”1 Following Eliot’s lead, Empson initially tries to explain why “the poets of the nineteenth century … are so little ambiguous in the sense with which I am concerned.”2 He focuses on the disjunction between poetry and science that saw poetry conceived as a refuge from science: “For a variety of reasons, they found themselves living in an intellectual framework with which it was very difficult to write poetry, in which poetry was rather improper, or was irrelevant to business, especially the business of becoming Fit to Survive, or was an indulgence of one’s lower nature in beliefs the scientists knew were untrue. On the other hand, they had a large public which was as anxious to escape from this intellectual framework, on holiday, as they were themselves.”3
But these ideas are not original to Empson. They may all be found at the beginning of “Defence of Poetic Analysis,” where Graves warns of the danger for the twentieth century “if the analytic interest developed by this scientific-industrial age is deliberately neglected by myself or my contemporaries as unsuitable for poetic treatment.”4 There is not just the disjunction between poetry and science generally, but also the association of poetry with the old pulse of the primitive within one’s lower nature: “The new Poetry, if it is ever written in our age, if the conflict and cleavage between the groups is not always too great … must be a reconciliation of scientific and philosophic theory on the one hand and the old pulse of love and fear on the other.”5 There is also the figure of arch- “Fit to survive”-scientist Darwin, one whose work in the scientific-industrial age has left him stranded beyond the reach of poetry: “Charles Darwin … deplored that his mind had been working along scientific lines so long that he found himself unable to appreciate poetry any more.”6 And there is the scientist’s suspicion – and even disapproval – of poetry: “there is an interesting figure, Sir Ronald Ross, who is famous for a very valuable scientific discovery in bacteriology and to whose poetic work a cordial greeting is given by a liberal group of critics and writers … On the other hand more than one distinguished scientist has in talk with me disowned Sir Ronald as not a scientist at all according to the ethics of the profession, but has branded him as a man of imagination who goes for this or that particular problem with a preconceived aim of social service instead of disinterestedly advancing the bounds of scientific knowledge without a thought for the consequences.”7 There is the poets’ recourse to beliefs that science knows to be untrue: “There was, of course, Francis Thomson, a poet with a passion for science, but … latterly he has got somewhat shy of the Beast, and I believe inclines to the mystic idea of outside control by spirits accounting for the genesis of poetry.”8 And so there is also the flight by poets and readers alike to poetry as an escape from science: “Mr. De la Mare has been for years predominantly a poet of escape and when his name is put forward by our leading literary journal, The Times Literary Supplement, as the greatest of the modern lyricists it means … that modern society is in such confusion that the greatest service a poet can do is to provide a temporary escape to the Lubberland of fantasy.”9 When Empson wrings his absorbent mind of its thoughts on the situation of poetry in the nineteenth century, the drops pool together and reveal a pronounced tincture of Graves.
Of course Empson and Graves were not alone in characterizing the poetry of the previous century as escapist. T.E. Hulme called romanticism “spilt religion,” a sloppy hankering after the infinite: “The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite,” “is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into eternal gases,” pantheistically collates “all beauty to an impression of the infinite in the identification of our being in absolute spirit.”10 Ford Madox Ford complained that nineteenth-century poets were cowards who could not face the problems of their own day: “It is a charming thing, it is a very lovely thing, it is a restful thing, to lose ourselves in meditations upon the Isles of the Blessed, and very sweet songs may be sung about them. But to do nothing else implies a want of courage. We live in our day, we live in our time, and he is not a proper man who will not look in the face his day and his time.”11 Eliot diagnosed in the poets of the nineteenth century a dissociated sensibility, which meant that “they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced” – not only unable “to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling,” but also unable to comprehend and express the “great variety and complexity” of their civilization – unable, that is, “to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into … meaning” the way the metaphysical poets had.12
Empson does not want to be too harsh on the poets of the nineteenth century: “fantasy gratification and a protective attitude towards one’s inner life are in some degree essential for the production of poetry.”13 In particular, he “has no wish to pretend the Romantics were not great poets.”14 Yet one has to draw the line somewhere, and for Empson the line is drawn wherever he finds nineteenth-century poets exploiting “the possibilities of never growing up,” preferring romantically to dwell in infantile fantasies.15 This tendency marks the morbid psychology that Empson regards as destructive of poetically meaningful ambiguity.
In other words, Empson finds nineteenth-century poets in general, and romantic poets in particular, interesting both psychologically and grammatically, but since “their distortions of meaning” tend to “belong to darker regions of the mind,” “the mode of approach to them should be psychological rather than grammatical.”16 Is Empson attempting here to distinguish his critical practice – if not his critical theory – from that of Graves? Although neither ignores the role of psychology or grammar in the special workings of poetry, Graves’s conflict theory might seem to be psychological first and grammatical second, regarding the doubleness of the poet’s psychological state as the thing represented by the doubleness of grammar, whereas Empson’s theory of ambiguity might seem to be grammatical first and psychological second, regarding the doubleness of the grammar as the meaningful event in its own right and the poet’s psychological state as observable only by inference. So to emphasize that poetic meaning resides in grammar rather than psychology could be seen as a revision of Graves’s work in the direction of Eliot’s effort in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to focus “honest criticism” upon the poem and not the poet.17 Even so, however, we have here a distinction without much practical difference for the literary criticism they practise: for both Empson and Graves, the ambiguity analysable on the page is the key to poetic meaning.
According to Empson, “those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers, but … it is not all significant ambiguities which are relevant.”18 He makes this point with reference to two lines in a poem by Ben Jonson that “say the opposite of what is meant”; since “there are no other two-faced implications of any plausibility” in the poem, the ambiguous meaning of the lines is not relevant grammatically but only – if at all – in terms of the mind of the poet, an accident by which an unimportant grammatical ambiguity appears in the poem.19 And so his declaration: “I am talking less about the minds of poets than about the mode of action of poetry.”20 Yet Empson’s criterion for determining the relevance of an ambiguity – that the poem demonstrates “other two-faced implications” of some “plausibility” – recalls Graves’s vision of “the thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce something like Poetry”: “I had a vision in my mind of the God of Poetry having two heads like Janus.”21 If Empson is tweaking Graves’s conflict theory in his distinction between the mind of the poet and the mode of action of poetry, it is still Graves’s description of poetry as two-faced that Empson recalls in his definition of poetry’s grammatically – rather than psychologically – ambiguous mode of action.
In another explanation of the two-headed God of Poetry, Graves begins with a psychological perspective: “it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the presence of sub-personalities in the poet’s mind. They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their ‘shadows,’ ‘dummies’ or ‘slaves,’ in order to excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits or code of honour.”22 Yet he quickly elides the difference between the grammar of the unconscious and the grammar of poetry:
“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry seems to be founded. He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in “Alice in Wonderland” … the duchess’ baby is represented as turning into a pig … That is a commonplace of dreams … When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing … One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The result is poetry – or nonsense.23
It can certainly be said that Graves is talking here as much about the mode of action of poetry as he is about the minds of poets.
At times, in fact, Graves is interested less in the psychological conflict supposed to have existed in the poet’s mind than in the grammatical conflict that constitutes the mode of action of poetry, as is clear in his close reading of “the rhyme to remember the signs of the Zodiac by”:
The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,
And next the Crab, the Lion shines,
The Virgin and the Scales,
The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat,
The Man who carries the Watering Pot,
The Fish with glittering tails.24
Contemplating the way language might otherwise be used to achieve the mnemonic purpose of this verse, Graves contrasts the language of science in particular and the language of prose in general with the distinctive language of poetry:
The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by popular imagery to a water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters where the fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualised his terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the goat, and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot.25
Rather than the mind of the poet or the illogic of the dream, it is here the “language of Poetry” that “converts” one person into another, and it is the language of poetry that converts one form of shining into another and one form of glittering into another.26 Empson makes the same point in the same terms in a passage quoted above: “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.”27
In fact, the mode of action of the language of poetry here is the only evidence of the mind of the anonymous author. And so Graves must extrapolate: “in the ‘Lion shines’ and the ‘glittering tails’ one can see that he has been thinking in terms of stars also.”28 As Graves notes in Poetic Unreason, where he develops this point further (in “protest against the myopic literary historian who denies that we know anything at all about the author of an anonymous poem”), “the fact is that when we come to examine Chevy Chace or any other poem whose author is either unknown or nothing but a name, we find that our knowledge of the poet’s politics, culture, nationality, his attitude to war, to love, to virtue, to truth, in fact all his important characteristics, is considerable.”29 (As noted earlier, when Graves reconstructed the characters of anonymous authors on the basis of their works during his talks at Oxford, many in his audiences applauded.)
So although Empson indicates that he is “talking less about the minds of poets than about the mode of action of poetry,” it is the same sense of poetry as a special language representing a distinct thinking experience that leads Empson also to allow that “those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers.”30 He recurs to the same point in his preface to the second edition: “If critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt.”31 That is to say, as Graves himself says, “Appreciation of a poem means nothing less than a certain intimate knowledge of the author.”32 Close reading inevitably reveals a human compound of thinking and feeling that a romantic reader will attribute to the writer and that a New Critic will attribute to a dramatic speaker or persona.
In terms of the relationship between the mind of the poet and the mode of action of poetry, then, Graves and Empson are usually on the same page – largely because Empson concentrates into a system what Graves scatters as provocative aperçus.
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Graves also agrees with Empson that romantic poets are interesting psychologically. His foregrounding of the romantic poets to demonstrate his conflict theory no doubt constitutes one of the psychoanalytical perspectives on the romantics that Empson represents as ubiquitous in the 1920s. As we have seen, Graves observes in On English Poetry that Keats’s “Merciless Lady … 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,” an observation developed further in The Meaning of Dreams: “La Belle Dame may represent also the figure of Poetry. Again, the close connection of this conflict of poetic ambition on the one hand and inability to write on the other, with the Fanny Brawne conflict and the Death by Disease conflict can be clearly shown.”33 Noting in “Ode on Melancholy” “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,” Empson sums up psychoanalytical approaches to Keats in terms of Freud’s thanatos and Oedipus: “Keats’s desire for death and his mother … has become a byword amongst the learned.”34 Graves also reads Wordsworth’s poetry psychoanalytically, remarking that Wordsworth uses his memory of daffodils “as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness.”35 Empson generalizes such psychoanalytical approaches to Wordsworth as follows: “Wordsworth frankly had no other inspiration than his use … of the mountains as a totem or father-substitute.”36
Graves finds romantics interesting psychologically because they write closer than most to the dream experience that he regards as the origin of spontaneous poetry: “dreams are illogical, and spontaneous undoctored poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those of childhood.”37 He not only regards romantic poetry as childish, but regards its childishness as evidence that it is as close to the archetype of poetry as any poetry can be:
it explains, to my satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for wonder … also the very much wider use in poetry than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of Biblical types, characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of imaginative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered ridiculous.38
And so Graves explains “the strict Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic,” “the dislike being apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of psychoanalysis, which involves the same process.”39
In Empson’s comments on the romantics, one can see that he agrees with Graves that conceiving things childishly and conceiving things poetically are related: “Almost all of them … exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically.”40 Their recourse to childhood effectively primed the poetic pump. Yet there is a problem here, according to Empson, insofar as that “whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration.”41 Characterizing the romantic’s world of childhood as “limited and perverted,” Empson not only fits the profile Graves provides of the classicist who dislikes the ungoverned indulgence of the child-spirit, but also seems to act out this profile rather theatrically in his introduction to Seven Types of Ambiguity: infantilising romantic poets by the indiscriminately sexualizing psychoanalysis that he and Graves both abjured. He writes that although “Coleridge, it is true, relied on opium rather than the nursery,” “Wordsworth frankly had no inspiration other than his use, when a boy, of the mountain as a totem or father-substitute,” “Byron only at the end of his life … escaped from the infantile incest-fixation upon his sister,” and Keats’s poetry is all about “desire for death and his mother.”42 Empson trashes romanticism and psychoanalysis whereas Graves defends them.
In his essay on the “Secondary Elaboration” of spontaneous poetry, for example, Graves explains how his own poem “The Bedpost” came to represent a conflict between what his “poet-friends” criticized as “nursery sentimentalities,” on the one hand, and Freud’s attitude toward childhood, on the other. During his revising of the poem, Graves explains, first, “I had been deeply interested in Freudian psycho-analysis as being a possible corrective for my shell-shock, which had just returned, and I was thinking of putting myself under treatment,” and, second, “I was very anxious on [my daughter’s] behalf owing to a belief that her nervous system had been undermined … by the neurotic condition of her nurse.” And so, he says, “It will be seen that my love of my child and my own nervous condition … were associated with the thought of psycho-analysis as a possible relief for both; and yet there was a resistance in my mind against being psycho-analysed. The poem is scattered thick with very bold and definite sex-symbolism … It will be seen that the conflict between my friends and myself … was being reconciled in this piece, my nursery sentimentality balanced with its very opposite, the cynical Freudian view of childhood.”43
Similarly, arguing that “there is no form poetry can take unworthy of our consideration, even our admiration,” Graves nominates Edward Lear’s “nonsensical” songs as worthy of anthologization alongside “other romantic poetry”: “the song of Calico Pie presenting grief in terms of childish invention is to me as poignant as the idea of Hamlet played by Burbage the actor as a comic part. Adoption of this pseudo-infantility must surely denote suffering in an extreme form.”44 In fact, “of the romantic-escape poets … Lear himself, poised humpty-dumpty-wise on the precarious ledge of nursery rhyme, is the chief.”45 Complaining that “Romanticism … has long been banished to the nursery or the ‘primitive’ community,” Graves works to rehabilitate not so much Lear in particular as the “associative method of thought” (or “the illogical element in poetry”) in general.46 And so Graves objects not just to “the strict Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic” but also to the implicitly denigrating attitudes towards the associative method of thought and the illogical element in poetry betrayed by Freud, Jung, and even, on occasion, Rivers himself:
Since the nursery is the one place where there is an audience not too sophisticated to appreciate ancient myths and so-called nonsense rhymes of greater or lesser antiquity, it happens that when we remember a dream, or write a poem in which we afterwards discover this emotional mode we say we are regressing to childhood … It is just here that psycho-analysis has been at its weakest; the theory of this childish survival has led the doctors of the Vienna school to ascribe to children the particularized passions of grown men and women; and the doctors of the Zurich school to ascribe to civilized man the particularized memory of a savage state enjoyed by his ancestors. Both ascriptions are due to this (to me) false idea that the Romantic or emotional mode of thought has no place in civilized life and is merely a survival of the child or the savage … A great advance from the scientific side on these theories is made by the late Dr. Rivers … but his admirable observations on the mechanism of dreams … are disappointing where they do not allow that associative thought is as modern and reputable a mode as intellectual thought, and regard it as a return to infantility.47
Graves insists that a distinction be drawn “between the infantile or primitive content of certain dreams and poems, and the emotional or romantic mode of thought often employed by sophisticated adults, which need not necessarily have an infantile or primitive content.”48 According to Graves, one of “the most unsatisfactory features hitherto of English psycho-analysis” has lain in “the supposed reference of Romanticism to a primitive or infantile content.”49
Empson’s attitude toward romanticism, infantilism, and psychoanalysis is, in fact, very similar. His complaint is not that the darker regions of a romantic’s mind could never have inspired grammatical ambiguity, but rather that the romantic poet’s determination to use everyday language made for an aesthetic bias against grammatical ambiguity: “the cult of simplicity moved its complexity back into the subconscious … and stated as simply as possible the fundamental disorders of the mind.”50 According to Empson, “the badness of much nineteenth-century poetry” comes from the attempt by “critically sensitive” but poetically limited writers to take short-cuts: “They admired the poetry of previous generations, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and failing to realise that the process of putting such a taste into the reader’s head involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in the head while it is being done, attempting, therefore, to conceive a taste in the head and put it straight on their paper, they produced tastes in the head which were in fact blurred, complacent, and unpleasing.”51
Empson also echoes here a point that Richards makes in one of his earliest essays, “Emotion and Art” (1919), concerning the difference between “the emotions which accompany the reading of any tragedy” and “the emotions which ensue as the import of the tragedy is understood”: “The first will probably be painful, will almost certainly be constricting; the second will be emotions of expansion and release. There is a certain uniformity about the latter emotions, which has helped to mislead theorists to the conclusion that the function of art is to arouse these emotions. That this is a mistake becomes plain when we consider that we can imaginatively and actually arouse these emotions … as a sentimental exercise. With a little practice this becomes quite easy.”52 Empson concludes his critique of the nineteenth-century’s aesthetic by complaining that the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats offers “imposed excitement, a sense of uncaused warmth, achievement, gratification.”53 Again he follows Richards, who observes of the easy practice of arousing emotions as a sentimental exercise that “such feelings owe their ridiculousness not to any defects as feelings, but to the absence of their really valuable appropriate causes.”54
According to Empson, romantics “were making a use of language very different from that of their predecessors.”55 Like Graves, Empson expects a poet to express “the complexity of the order of his mind” through the ambiguous order of his words.56 But he contends that the romantics avoided complexity in two ways. First, what Graves calls conflict and what Empson calls ambiguity was not experienced and expressed poetically as a mode of two-faced thought; rather, it was self-consciously and deliberately contemplated as a topic and expressed as a conclusion (whether about melancholy, dejection, loneliness, or what have you): they “stated as simply as possible the fundamental disorders of the mind.”57 In Graves’s terms, according to Empson’s analysis, they turned romanticism as mode into romanticism as content. And so romantics did “not need to use ambiguities of the kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language, or even ambiguities with which the student of language, as such, is concerned.”58 “Wordsworth,” Empson baldly declares, “was not an ambiguous poet.”59 Second, romantics repressed any complexity that they could not express according to their aesthetic of grammatical simplicity – short-circuiting romanticism as mode in favour of romanticism as content: “the cult of simplicity moved its complexity back into the subconscious, poisoned only the sources of thought, in the high bogs of the mountains” – leaving the poetry grammatically as much parched as pure.60 They thereby hurt themselves as much as their poetry: both were made psychologically morbid by the distortions that repression gives rise to. And so “the mode of approach to them should be psychological rather than grammatical,” for “their distortions of meaning” do not belong to the realm of poetry proper, but rather “belong to darker regions of the mind.”61
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For all of Empson’s huffing and puffing about the “limited and perverted” nature of the work of certain poets, his explanation as to why nineteenth-century poets “are so little ambiguous in the sense with which I am concerned” turns out, once again, to have its origin in Graves. This time he is influenced by Graves’s attempt to distinguish between the infantile or primitive as the content of romanticism, on the one hand, and the infantile or primitive as a type of romanticism’s adult and sophisticated associative mode of thought, on the other.62
In his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson clearly agrees with Graves that this associative mode of thought underwrites the ambiguity that is a part of all good poetry, ambiguity that arises as a function of the attempt to name the unnamed: “As I understand it, there is always in great poetry … an appeal to a background of human experience which is all the more present when it cannot be named.”63 According to Empson, ambiguity ought to be a function of “proper occasion” – “it is a thing which the more interesting and valuable situations are more likely to justify” – and the more proper the occasion, the more “serious” the ambiguity.64 Graves’s chapter on “The Illogical Element in Poetry” in Poetic Unreason makes precisely this point – that only the emotional or associative mode of thought can deal with human experience that is beyond language dominated by logic: “Logic only likes one meaning for every word. If it finds the phrase somewhere written ‘The Hound of Heaven’ there must be only one significance to this Hound idea or to this Heaven idea, not three or four: that is considered illogical.”65 The experience that Empson believes that the poem makes present without naming is explained by Graves as follows: “the secondary meanings of words, however remote, react on each other in moments of passion if there is any similarity of emotional disturbance between the associations these meanings conjure up.”66 According to Graves, “in emotion logic gives place to this associative method of thought, the effect being a stringent condensation of the circumlocution otherwise necessary, the substitution of symbol, for grammatic phrase.”67 Empson makes the same point in his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity when he suggests that what moves a reader in “an apparently simple line” are “traces of … his past experience and … his past judgments,” and that “the cause of so straddling a commotion and so broad a calm” in the reader must be the “implications” “of such lines.”68 In great poetry, the lines are never simple, for the associative mode of thought that produces “an apparently simple line” guarantees that simplicity always belies the complexity of ambiguity.69
Tracing the pattern of such emotional associations is the staple of Empson’s practical criticism, as in his extended analysis of ambiguity of the fifth type in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (concerning the lines by Giovanni: “let not the curse/Of old prescription rend from me the gall / Of courage, which enrols a glorious death: / If I must totter like a well-grown oak, /Some undershrubs shall in my weighty fall/Be crushed to splits”):
Gall is first used as “spirit to resent insults” … By the next line galls have suggested oak-galls (the reactions of an oak to irritations), and the idea of proper retaliation is transferred to its power of falling on people, whether they are guilty of wrongs against it or not. But in between these two definite meanings the curious word enrolled seems a blurring of the focus; he is thinking of the situation itself, rather than either metaphor … A glorious death may be enrolled on the scroll of fame, so that the word could stand by itself; or, looking backwards, one may gain strength for a glorious death by being bathed in, sustained by, a spurt of bitterness, so that gall has been rent (now with the opposite consequences) from its boundaries in the orderly mind, by being rolled in, or around about by, gall; or, looking backwards, it may be the oak itself which rolls down, both to death and upon its victims. You may say this is fanciful, and he was only looking for a word that contained the letter “r” which kept up the style, but in that case it is these associations which explain how that particular word came into his mind.70
This last sentence reads as though Empson were countering Richards’s over-confident identification of what seems to him the single source of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and his subsequent, disdainful dismissal of Graves’s reading of “Kubla Khan” in The Meaning of Dreams as representing “the gravest dangers” of a fanciful Freudianism. For Empson agrees with Graves: multiple associations bring poetry to be. When discussing ambiguity of the seventh type, which, like ambiguity of the third type, he explicitly links to Graves’s conflict theory, Empson declares that he has sought through his discussion of “the identity of opposites” in ancient and modern languages as “a rather sophisticated state of language and feeling” “to cast upon the reader something of the awe and horror which were felt by Dante arriving finally at the most centrique part of earth,” for in examining this way of associating words we “are approaching the secret places of the Muse.”71 In the end, Empson’s complaint about nineteenth-century poets in general, and romantic poets in particular, is that they too often belie proper romanticism – which is to say that he accepts the very argument that Graves is at pains to make about the romantic nature of all true poetry.
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Graves has entered Empson’s mind in so many ways that even Empson’s imagined interlocutor is often the same as Graves’s imagined interlocutor: one who says of the associations revealed, “this is fanciful” (for the poet “was only looking for a word containing the letter ‘r’ which kept up the style”); one who says of analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets that a “slender Sonnet ought not to take so much explaining”; one who says of a poem that even if its associational “wealth of reference and feeling … is true” then the poet “wrote without properly clarifying his mind.”72 Even when he invokes T.S. Eliot as interlocutor, Empson implicitly accounts for Eliot’s obtuseness (about the anatomical accuracy of Shelley’s reference in “Hellas” to a snake’s shedding of its skin) by imputing to him the same constricting veneration of the clarified mind shared by the other imaginary interlocutors whom both he and Graves would refute. That is, he imagines Eliot dismissing Shelley with the remark, “a seventeenth-century poet would have known his own mind on such points.”73
Going back to the ancient Egyptians for an example of sophisticated people who know their own minds differently from Europeans who have been educated in the Greco-Roman tradition, Empson follows Graves in blaming the Greeks both for Western literary criticism’s veneration of the clear mind and for its equally longstanding neglect of the “illogical” (or emotional or associational) element in poetry. As Graves explains:
In treating of the illogical aspects of poetry … “illogical” I am using here in a narrower sense as meaning poetry which does not conform with those principles of logic which govern what I have been calling intellectual as opposed to emotional thought. This logic is a system slowly deduced from the broadest and most impersonal analyses of cause and effect, capable always of empiric proof … Poetry of the kind which we recognize as Romantic or Fantastic or Inspired being … dependent on associative thought, its symbolism intimately bound up with a vast number of logical false premises, a defiance of the ordered spatio-temporal structure which the civilized intellect has built for its habitation – this Poetry when Logic was first achieving pre-eminence under the Greeks, either had to be banned altogether from the ideal republic of the philosophers as Plato wished it banned, or had to submit itself to a severe examination and systematization – hence Aristotle’s Poetics. For centuries since, philosophic speculation about emotional poetry, dreams and phantasy has been silent or has found only illogic in them.74
Aristotle is particularly culpable for the Western critic’s expectation that lyric poetry should constitute “logically harmonious and rational statement”: “He was intending to make poetry conform to an absolute system, to weed it of all the symbolic extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state from which romantic poetry has always originated, and to confine it within rational and educative limits.”75 And so Graves complains that for “the method of Romantic Poetry and the method of thought in fantastic dreams … logic has had for centuries nothing but the sneering patronage of the self-respecting citizen for the grotesque but cheerful village idiot. It is this superior intellectual attitude inherited from the logical revival of the eighteenth century that causes a deal of confusion in contemporary literary criticism.”76 Graves then invokes an anecdote told by the proverbial English scholar as illustration of the limits of the proverbial German scholar: “The Aristotelian tradition for literary criticism survives strongly to-day, particularly, it is supposed, in Germany. The traditional English view of German Shakespearean scholarship is enshrined in the tale of the commentator who amended Duke Senior in As You Like It from: ‘But this our life exempt from public haunt / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones and good in everything’ to: ‘Finds leaves on trees, stones in the running brooks, /Sermons in books and good in everything’ … But instead of grimacing, ‘Lo, the poor German,’ let us pause to consider whether the traditional English comment on Shakespeare’s Romantic method has been any more valuable than the Teuton’s.”77 Against critics concerned to explain away Shakespeare’s “psychological inconsistencies,” his tendency to introduce “details which cause us to lose the sense of a connected whole,” and his neglect of “Aristotelian standards,” Graves nominates Shakespeare as a standard-bearer of romantic values: “This very inconsistency of plot, the development of this emblem or that in unforeseen directions, has and must always have a necessity and beauty which the context of the author’s life would make apparent. Poetry is not as some people want it to be, a condensation and rearrangement of past events, according to a preconceived logical structure, not merely a combination of historic strands, but a new entity whose past is past; even intellectual verses are not recognized as conforming to any principles until after they have found their expression on paper.”78 Whether as the Englishman’s caricature of the German scholar or as Graves’s caricature of the contemporary English critic, the figure of fun here is the same literary stick-in-the-mud that Empson regularly imagines objecting to associational patterns of ambiguity as “fanciful” and “not properly clarifying.”79 And Graves’s conception of the nature of poetic language as a thinking and feeling in process is also the same as Empson’s.
Graves grounds poetic language in a more primitive mode of thought capable of identifying opposites in the way that Empson highlights by reference both to the ancient Egyptian language and to contemporary Arabic. Graves complains that “the scholastic tradition as finally systematized in the textbooks … ridicules the ancient notion that medical bane and salve are always to be found growing together.”80 Empson makes the same observation in his discussion of ambiguity of the seventh type, the kind of ambiguity that will support “theories of aesthetics which regard poetry as the resolution of a conflict.”81 Citing Freud’s Notebooks, he observe that
early Egyptians, apparently, wrote the same sign for “young” and “old,” showing which was meant by an additional hieroglyphic, not to be pronounced … They only gradually learnt to separate the two sides of the antithesis and think of the one without conscious comparison with the other … In so far as opposites are used to resolve or to soften conflict, so that an ageing man is not forced suddenly to find that a new and terrible word will apply to him, or can speak of himself as a young man by an easy and forgivable alteration of tone; to this extent there seems to be nothing peculiarly primitive about the sentiment, or the delicacy which allows it to be phrased … This discussion is in some degree otiose because I really do not know what use the Egyptians made of their extraordinary words, or how “primitive” we should think their use of them if we heard them talking.82
Empson has taken on board the distinction that Graves is at pains to make in Poetic Unreason between primitive as something “childish” (and therefore contemptible) and primitive as something “of ancient origin” (but possibly still quite intelligent and sophisticated). Conceding that the ancient Egyptian identification of opposites “has, perhaps, something primitive in its weakness of hold on external truth, and its honesty in voicing desires” – to this extent, it may seem childish – Empson emphasizes that the so-called primitive identification of opposites can be conceptually a very sophisticated business: instancing Arabic as “a striking case of the mental sophistication required to use a word which covers its own opposite,” Empson declares that he believes “that though such words appeal to the fundamental habits of the human mind, and are fruitful of irrationality, they are to be expected from a rather sophisticated state of language and feeling.”83
•
Empson’s explanation as to why nineteenth-century poets “are so little ambiguous” in Empson’s sense of the term is a warning to readers that they ought not to expect his analysis of ambiguity to rely on examples from nineteenth-century poetry.84 Yet far from scanting nineteenth-century poets, Empson devotes about 13 % of his book to analysis of the role of ambiguity in their work, putting them in a respectable fourth place in this regard (after Shakespeare first, the Renaissance generally second, and the eighteenth century third). Empson devotes especially extensive analyses to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. In fact, contrary to what the introductory chapter leads one to expect, they actually enjoy a certain prominence as exemplars of several different types of ambiguities. So the talk was anti-romantic, but the walk was not.
Empson returns to the topic in his 1947 preface, apologizing for spending so much time on these poets and the question of their aesthetic theory and practice, explaining that he had been led away from verbal analysis by the “cross-current” created at the time by “Mr. T.S. Eliot’s criticism in particular, and the Zeitgeist in general” – a situation “calling for a reconsideration of the claims of the nineteenth-century poets so as to get them in perspective with the newly discovered merits of Donne, Marvell, and Dryden. It seemed that one could only enjoy both groups by approaching them with different and incompatible presuppositions, and that this was one of the great problems which a critic ought to tackle.”85
One of the ways in which Seven Types of Ambiguity continues to be interesting is that it records the development of Empson’s discoveries about poetic ambiguity between 1928 and 1930 as though he were creating ambiguity of the fifth type, which “occurs when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at once … Any fortunate muddle would be included in this, such as occurs in the course of digesting one’s material.”86 Neither edited out before first publication, nor any subsequent edition, is evidence that Empson’s thinking about nineteenth-century poetry changes during the writing of the book to the extent of contradicting and retracting in later chapters a good deal of what has been said in earlier ones. And so Shelley can be dismissed in the first chapter as one of those nineteenth-century poets “hugging to oneself a private dream-world” who did not keep a sharp enough “distinction between the world he considered real and the world from which he wrote poetry,” whose “uncaused,” “imposed” emotions obviate the “need to use ambiguities,” and yet he can appear later as the central figure in discussion of ambiguity of the fifth type, a veritable virtuoso of this form of poetry.87 In fact, we learn from the 1947 preface that Shelley is even more central to chapter five than might at first have appeared, for the discussion of Swinburne that follows the discussion of Shelley turns out to have been enabled by the latter ( “looking for a puzzle” in Shelley “made me discover something about Swinburne”).88 In addition, the discussion of Marvell that concludes the chapter is designed to show the continuity between, on the one hand, Shelley and Swinburne, who establish the “subdued conceits and ambiguities” that proliferate in the nineteenth century and, on the other hand, Marvell and “the later metaphysical poets,” who “came to take the conceit for granted … till they were writing something like nineteenth-century poetry.”89 It seems that “Marvell was admired both by his own generation and by the nineteenth century,” which is understandable since “the nineteenth-century technique” of ambiguity “is in part the metaphysical tradition dug up when rotten.”90 And so Empson concludes his observations about the development of ambiguity of the fifth type by emphasizing that it culminates in “the Romantic Movement’s technique; dark hair, tidal water, landscape at dusk are dissolved in your mind, as often in dreams, into an apparently direct sensory image which cannot be attached to any of the senses.”91 From beginning to end, chapter five is Empson’s defence of Shelley in particular and nineteenth-century poetry in general. So it is not surprising that Empson concludes it with a nod in the direction of Graves, whose insistent alignment of romanticism with fantastic dreams – it is virtually the sine qua non of his early criticism – is echoed here: “dark hair, tidal water, landscape at dusk are dissolved in your mind, as often in dreams.”
As indicated above, Empson took note of Graves’s reading of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” developing Graves’s observations about romantic allegory into his definition of ambiguity of the third type. He also recalls the psycho-biographical exercise in criticism that Graves conducts by research into Keats. Noting the “opposite notions combined in this poem” ( “death and the sexual act,” “pain and pleasure,” “the conception of woman as at once mistress and mother,” “a desire at once for the eternity of fame and the irresponsibility of oblivion”), Empson suggests 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.”92 Graves makes this very point: “appreciation rises in the reader’s mind as the result of the same imaginative thinking that produced the poem, without the need of any long-winded translation into a more logical form.”93 Graves believes that explanations of lived experience and associational logic lie behind all poems, but no more than Empson does he believe that awareness of them is necessary for the aesthetic enjoyment of poetry.
In Empson’s first extended discussion of Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” is offered as an example of a poem demonstrating ambiguity of the fourth type, which “occurs when 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.”94 But it turns out that Wordsworth was simply in a muddled, rather than a complex, state of mind: Empson concludes that his analysis of “Tintern Abbey” “may show how these methods can be used to convict a poet of holding muddled opinions rather than to praise the complexity of the order of his mind.”95 Yet in his later discussion of Wordsworth, Empson apologizes for this evaluation, noting that he was not only harsh but misguided. Considering whether or not “Tintern Abbey” offers evidence of type-four ambiguity is beside the point, for he has now discovered that it exemplifies the more complex state of mind represented by ambiguities of the sixth type!
Empson’s promotion of Wordsworth from muddled type-four wannabe to master exemplar of type six also owes a good deal to Graves. For instance, Empson’s initial discussion of (attack on) “Tintern Abbey” is largely mapped out by Graves in his discussion of Wordsworth’s related poem, “Intimations of Immortality.” Contrasting his own conflict theory with the attitude of the scholar devoted to logic, Graves suggests that “the scholastic critic finds the chief value of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ in the religious argument … [I] f he … suspected Wordsworth of reasoning from a wrong premise he would have serious doubts as to whether it was a good poem after all.”96 Empson initially presents himself as just such a critic of Wordsworth’s reasoning from wrong premises. He points to the lines that speak of learning to look on nature in such a way as to perceive the spirit that “rolls through all things” and declares: “Wordsworth seems to have believed in his own doctrines and wanted his readers to know what they were. It is reasonable, then, to try to extract from this passage definite opinions on the relations of God, man, and nature … The reason why one grudges Wordsworth this source of strength is that he talks as if he owned a creed by which his half-statements might be reconciled, whereas, in so far as his creed was definite, he found these half-statements necessary to keep it at bay. There is something rather shuffling about this attempt to be uplifting, yet non-denominational.”97 Half-statements keep “muddled opinions” at bay.98 On revisiting “Tintern Abbey” after two more chapters, however, Empson arrives at a new conclusion about Wordsworth’s psychological and verbal achievement in the poem: the discussion of “Tintern Abbey” as “the last example of my fourth chapter belongs by rights to the sixth; I gave a rather nagging and irrelevant analysis of one of the great passages of Wordsworth, and complained that his theological statements were … a sort of generalization from theological opinions; Wordsworth is concerned with the resultant sentiments rather than the source of belief from which they are drawn. So one cannot say that he is contradicting himself, even by implication, because the theological ideas he has to invoke are not, so to speak, what he wants to make a statement about.”99
In just the same way, after rehearsing the “scholastic” quarrel with Wordsworth’s theology that Graves rehearsed and dismissed, Empson dismisses it too.100 He has arrived at Graves’s point of departure in studying poetry generally (and “Intimations of Immortality” in particular): to the doubt that a poem “reasoning from a wrong premise” can be “a good poem after all,” Graves avers, “even the most pagan and revolutionary bard would raise a furious protest; if the poem holds together, if the poet has said what he means honestly, convincingly and with passion – as Wordsworth did – the glory and the beauty of the dream are permanently fixed beyond the scientific lecturer’s pointer.”101 The scholastic critic, says Graves, “would not be interested to be told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy contradiction between his own happy childhood, idealistic boyhood and disappointed age.”102 Empson is no such scholastic critic, of course, for he is very interested to be told this – in fact, he tells himself pretty much the same thing in Chapter Six, and so tells himself off for having got interpretation of Wordsworth so wrong in Chapter Four.
Extended reflection on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” during the writing of Seven Types of Ambiguity thus leads Empson not just to insights into the sixth type of ambiguity, but also to insights into the seamlessness with which mental conflict and verbal ambiguity merge in the best poetry: “In a sense, the sixth class is included within the fourth … The criterion for the sixth class is more verbal … But the criterion for the sixth class is not merely verbal, in contrast with the psychological criterion of the fourth; indeed, if a poet is using language properly, it ought to be impossible to maintain such a distinction.”103 Empson gives up the attempt to blame Wordsworth for muddled thinking because he accepts that Wordsworth has used language properly (not in a way different from his predecessors, as he originally claimed) and that he has thereby made it impossible for the reader to distinguish (as Empson originally tried to do) between his state of mind and his use of words.
In writing Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson begins in the grip of contemporary prejudice against the romantics. Eliot had announced that poets must “force … dislocate if necessary, language into meaning,” and he had reported that the poets of the nineteenth century had been inadequate to the task.104 Empson initially discovered in their work “distortions of meaning” that held promise of the meaning that he and Eliot valued, but he concluded that romantic grammar belongs “to the darker region of the mind” and so advised that the approach to it “should be psychological rather than grammatical.”105 Yet he develops through the tutelage of Graves’s close readings not just a theory of criticism but also a practice of criticism – especially in Wordsworth’s case – that leaves him pleasantly surprised by ambiguity where his own presuppositions had told him it would not be found. Allowing the ferment of this process of discovery to remain in Seven Types of Ambiguity may have struck Empson as the best way to bring along with him readers who begin the book with the same Eliotic prejudice as he did: that nineteenth-century poetry cannot be reconciled with the associational virtues of the poetry of Donne, Marvell, and Dryden.
1 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. enlarged (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 287, 289, 287, 287, 287.
2 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), 26.
3 Ibid.
4 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 83.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 84.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 84–5.
9 Ibid., 85.
10 T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and Art (1924; repr. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936), 113–40.
11 Ford Madox Ford, “Modern Poetry,” in The Critical Attitude (1911; repr. London: Books for Libraries Press, 1967), 187.
12 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 288, 289, 289, 289.
13 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 27.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 17.
18 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 307.
19 Ibid., 306.
20 Ibid., 307.
21 Ibid., 306, 306; Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 62.
22 Graves, On English Poetry, 117–18.
23 Ibid., 121–2.
24 Ibid., 99, 99–100.
25 Ibid., 100.
26 Ibid.
27 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 319.
28 Graves, On English Poetry, 100.
29 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 89.
30 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 307.
31 William Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1953; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1984), xv–xvi.
32 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 89.
33 Graves, On English Poetry, 51–2; Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 144.
34 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 273, 26.
35 Graves, On English Poetry, 44.
36 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 26.
37 Graves, On English Poetry, 68.
38 Ibid., 68–9.
39 Ibid., 69.
40 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 26.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 27, 26, 26, 26.
43 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 106, 106, 106, 108–9, 109.
44 Ibid., 22–3.
45 Ibid., 24.
46 Ibid., 126, 119, 117.
47 Graves, On English Poetry, 69, 69; Graves, Poetic Unreason, 126–7.
48 Graves, On English Poetry, 141.
49 Ibid.
50 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 191.
51 Ibid., 22.
52 I.A. Richards, “Emotion and Art,” in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 9.
53 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 27.
54 I.A. Richards, “Emotion and Art,” 9.
55 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 27.
56 Ibid., 194.
57 Ibid., 191.
58 Ibid., 27.
59 Ibid., 191.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 27.
62 Ibid., 26.
63 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xv.
64 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 298.
65 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 120.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 119.
68 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xv.
69 Ibid., emphasis added.
70 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 196.
71 Ibid., 247, 248, 249, 249.
72 Ibid., 196, 196, 175, 175, 175.
73 Ibid., 201.
74 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 117–8.
75 Ibid., 121, 120–1.
76 Ibid., 119.
77 Ibid., 121.
78 Ibid., 122, 122, 123, 123–4.
79 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 196, 175.
80 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 117.
81 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 246.
82 Ibid., 246–9.
83 Ibid., 247, 248.
84 Ibid., 26.
85 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” viii.
86 Ibid., 195–204.
87 Ibid., 27, 26, 27, 27, 27.
88 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” viii.
89 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 208, 209, 209.
90 Ibid., 220, 208, 208.
91 Ibid., 222.
92 Ibid, 273.
93 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 158–9.
94 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 168.
95 Ibid., 194.
96 Graves, On English Poetry, 45.
97 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 192–4.
98 Ibid., 194.
99 Ibid., 241.
100 Graves, On English Poetry, 45.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 241–2.
104 Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 289.
105 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 27.