I lived from 1906-1984.
I was from England, and am in the English category.
A thesis, he was required to do as part of his studies later became published as his first, and perhaps most influential, critical work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). With the publications of Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), The Structure of Complex Words (1951) and Milton's God (1961), he rapidly became seen as one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century.
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As well as his success in the critical field, Empson also wrote poetry and exercised great technical influence over the group of poets known as 'the Movement. His detail to text and form make him a technical poet, able to stand along-side those he wrote a critical opinion on. His first volume of poetry to be published, Poems (1935) is influenced in tone and technique by John Donne, a personnel favourite of his.
Through-out the 1930s, Empson was working as a teacher in Japan and China, and his experiences there became the base for his next publication of poetry, The Gathering Storm (1940).
During the Second World War he was appointed Chinese Editor of the BBC but returned to a teaching post at Peking National University in 1947 and 1953 he became Professor, until 1971, when he moved to Sheffield University in the role of Professor Emeritus of English Literature.
He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1976 and became Sir William Empson with a knighthood in 1979.
William Empson Died in the year 1984.
A volume of his critical essays entitled Essays on Renaissance Literature: Donne and the New Philosophy after being edited by John Haffenden was published in 1993
Notes and Selected Bibliography from.
The Johns Hopkins University Press (1997)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc. (2003)
Wikipedia free encyclopedia (2002)
My poetry
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
41 lines
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
19 lines
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
23 lines, 1 comment
This last pain for the damned the Fathers found:
"They knew the bliss with which they were not crowned."
43 lines
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
42 lines, 1 comment
There is a supreme God in the ethnological section;
A hollow toad shape, faced with a blank shield.
16 lines
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
6 lines
Not but they die, the teasers and the dreams,
Not but they die,
16 lines
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