Seven Types of Ambiguity

by William Empson

First published in 1930, Seven Types of Ambiguity has long been recognized as a landmark in the history of English literary criticism. Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough by his own admission sometimes to see "stretched absurdly far," he launches into a brilliant discussion, under seven classifications of differing complexity and depth, of such works, among others, as Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Poetry, Criticism, Philosophy, Writing, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.

He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics. Jonathan Bate has said that the three greatest English Literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".

Empson has been styled a "critic of genius" by Sir Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying willfully perverse readings of certain authors; and Harold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him, because of their force and eccentricity. Empson's bluntness led to controversy both during his life and after his death, and a reputation in part also as a "licensed buffoon" (Empson's own phrase).

Reviews

[The Literary Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally purchased after reading a short story by Shirley Jackson about a character's ambiguous action to something said, this book became something I was determined to read through. Fascinating, mentally stimulating, and engrossing, even if you have to chain yourself to a wall to read it. Best comprehended reading in a windowless room, devoid of all but a desk, chair, and lamp, for uninterrupted 3 hour intervals.

[Georgia Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impenetrable. I've tried and I'm fed up. I'm making apple pancakes.

[Rose Rosetree · Rating 5 out of 5]

All writing can be redolent of ambiguity, just as all musical notes can set off overtones and harmonics.

Whether it's fiction, nonfiction, or today's creative fiction? Rich ambiguity is one of my personal requirements for greatness.

All seven types count, to me, as remarkable discoveries. Here I'll just add a bit about metaphor, the first of William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity."

PERSONALLY, I CAN'T GET THROUGH A SINGLE DAY WITHOUT USING METAPHORS. OFTEN.

* The very notion that life on Earth is all about fixed objects or persons. Impossibly limiting!
* And, moreover, separate versions of each object or person are supposed to be discrete, like black-and-white photographs? (Ha, see what I did just there?)

PERSONALLY, JUST SAYING, I CANNOT LIVE THAT WAY

Empson deconstructed all those types of ambiguity with commendable logic and inimitable cleverness. As for me, mostly, I rememberthe effect this book had upon me: such sweet relief.

By which I mean, Empson's book allowed me to recognize that ambiguity might be permissable. Beyond that, this permission allowed me to better understand how I had always been savoring life.

As if Empson met me and gave me a blessing: It's okay, how your particular mind-heart-soul-individuality... works.

You see, Goodreaders, I've always been at least as interested in the nuances as the literal particulars. Even when watching a literal sunrise!

For another example, in high school, in Manhattan, I'd often make a beeline after school. Not only would I go straight to the Museum of Modern Art (then free of charge). I'd head for one specific room, the one where I could surround myself with "Water Lilies" by Monet.

As if that could console me for all the city's hard edges, all of them, not just all those spiky skyscrapers.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empson argues that ambiguity is a central device of poetry, and that it distinguishes poetry from other forms of writing. For him, writers such as William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope and John Donne regularly employed the ambiguities of sense and syntax as a way of giving expression to highly complex ideas.

Most of the book is analysis of examples as Empson supplies multiple readings of words and phrases from various poems in order both to define the different types of ambiguity and to substantiate his assertion that ambiguity is a significant literary device. For some, Empson’s close readings may seem like an instance of reading too much or too deeply into the poems; for me, though, the level of attention Empson gives to the language of the poems he analyzes is appropriate, particularly as he is discussing the work of writers who were intensely word-conscious (and insofar as Empson is trying to prove that ambiguity is a dominant device in English poetry, he really cannot avoid reading rather closely the poetry he discusses simply in order to make his point).

In addition to analysis of examples, the book includes more theoretical and even philosophical commentary on ambiguity. In the first chapter, in a great show of reasoning, Empson defends his assertion that ambiguity is a significant poetic device; this is followed by a discussion of the relation between sound and sense in poetry. In his chapter on the seventh type of ambiguity, Empson employs the discourses both of psychoanalysis and of symbolic logic, and in his conclusion he distinguishes between the appreciation and the analysis as two dominant forms of poetic criticism.

Acquired 1995
The Word, Montreal, Quebec

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empson in his preface the second edition of his book observes that ‘The method of verbal analysis is of course the main point of the book’. Empson asks ‘is all good poetry supposed to be ambiguous?’ I think that it is.

He follows this up in chapter I. “Ambiguity” itself can mean an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one other or both of two things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings’.

To illustrate his point he observes, ‘To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling, in Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang, but the comparison holds for many reasons, because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallized out of the likeness of a forest coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and egotistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beatify and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind...”

Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

According to Empson 19th century poetry was devoid of ambiguity. Empson, by quoting, proves ‘Brightness falls from the air as an example of ambiguity by vagueness. Is it light emanating from the sky or is a threat of thunder?’ Empson chooses a few lines from Synge’s play Deirdre as an example of ambiguity with an overtone of dramatic irony. Neisi has been killed and Conchubor left in possession.

Deirdre who’ll fight the grave, Conchubor, and it opened on a dark night?

‘The night is dark enough now, and, of course, her main meaning is that she can’t be fought after she has killed herself. But she herself could not fight against the impulses of the night at the beginning of the play.’

The next important reference in Empson is to the play on the ‘nothing in King Lear.’

Empson chooses Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXXI to comment on the fluidity of grammar balanced by rhetoric plays on words like ‘tongues’ ‘eyes’ ‘rehearse’ in the poem.

The next comment to note is—’It is the part of a civilized language to be simplified in structure and generalized in its notions; of a civilized people to keep their linguistic rules and know what they are about; but this must not blind us to the nature of such phrases as; There thou, great Anna whom three realms obey. Dost sometimes council take, and sometimes tea.’ (Pope, Rape of the Lock)

Where the effect of limited comprehensiveness, of a unity in variety mirrored from the real world, is obtained by putting together two of the innumerable meanings of the take.

The next example chosen is from the beginning of Eliot’s, ‘The Waste Land’, second section ‘A Game of Chess’.

Empson comments, ‘what is poured may be cases, Jewels, glitter, or light and profusion enriching its modern meaning with its derivation, is shared, with a dazzled luxury, between them; so that while some of the jewels are pouring out light from their cases others are poured about as are their cases on the dressing table.’

Empson next quotes from Eliot:

“Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breathless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin”

Leaned may be verb or participle; either ‘Webster saw the skull under the skin and the skeletons under the ground, which were learning backwards’ (leaned may be a verb with ‘that’ understood, as so often in English, but it is hard to distinguish this case from the participle), or, stressing the semi-colon, Webster saw the skull under the skin, but meanwhile, independently of him, and whether seem or no, the creatures underground leaned backward,’ both in order to have their laugh out, and to look upward at the object of their laughter.

The verse, whose point is the knowledge of what is beyond knowledge, is made much more eerie by this slight doubt.’ We can now mention Empson’s point: ‘King Lear is more desperate in his variety of uses for the genitive:

Blasts and fogs upon thee.
The untented wounding of a father’s curse
Pierce every sense about thee.
(Lear, I. IV. 320)

The wounds may be case or effect of the curse uttered by a father; independently of this, they may reside in the father or his child. The next example of ambiguity is from Othello: ‘That I did love the Moore, to live with him, My downright violence, and storme of Fortunes May trumpet to the world.

It is after the pattern we have considered, except that the adjective throws a new term into the calculation; it qualifies either violence or violence and storme, and thus tends to detach violence from fortunes’.

An ambiguity of the third type, considered as a verbal matter, occurs when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously. This is often done by reference to derivation; thus Delilah is that specious monster my accomplished snare

The notes say: specious, ‘beautiful and deceitful’; monster, ‘something unnatural and something striking, shown as a sign of disaster,’ accomplished ‘skilled in the arts’ of blandishment and successful in undoing her husband’. The point here is the sharpness of distinction between the two meanings.

‘An ambiguity of the fourth type occurs when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear more complicated state of mind in the author.’ Empson analyses A Valediction, of weeping from this point of view. The other ambiguities are not specifically mentioned.

Empson concludes his book with a belief that all sorts of poetry may be conceived as explicable. His intention is to make poetry more beautiful.

Empson is a successor of Eliot as is I. A. Richards.

Most recommended.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a brief summary of the 7 types:

Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson

Empsom defines ambiguity as "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language."

Here are the seven types of ambiguity he listed:

1. "a detail is effective in several ways at once"

2. "two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one"

3. "two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously"

4. "the alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author"

5. "a fortunate confusion, as when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing . . . or
not holding it all in mind at once"

6. "what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to invent interpretations"

7. "of full contradiction, marking a division in the author's mind"


There are possibly other types as well. All of them complicate and enrich language.

[Warren R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under the false guise of literary criticism, William Empson has produced a true comic masterpiece, a book of enormous intellectual energy and verbal wit, which is closer in spirit and "atmosphere" to the impractical, rambling novels of Sterne than to the grave Practical Criticism of I.A. Richards.

At the same time, Empson puts forward his thesis about "ambiguity" in poetry, which actually is not that ambiguous and nonsensical, if you could just stop laughing for a second (which you couldn't possibly).

[Tim Doughty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up less than halfway through. It was recommended in a lecture by Noam Chomsky so I had high expectations. I would have enjoyed an analysis of how poets use ambiguous language and structures in their work, but this was way too much. Another reviewer said, “turgid and repetitive” and I agree. It’s written in the traditional style of philosophers who don’t care if only specialists will understand what they are saying.

[Saba Houmani]

Toxic levels of double major energy here.

[Neil Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was both very engaging, and a real demon to get through. Nominally, the thesis of the book is that ambiguity is at the core of the beauty of literature. Empson is going to break down that ambiguity into seven types, starting from very subtle ambiguities at the level of an individual word, and building up to ambiguities in the author's whole frame of mind.

Near the beginning, he looks at this simple pun from Alexander Pope:

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.

By the end, we're considering the ambiguities of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who (Empson argues) felt deeply conflicted about the religious duty he devoted his life to.

In practice, these seven types of ambiguity are not a rigid classification, and Empson freely admits that many of his examples could fall into one or another bucket, depending on how you're inclined to think about them. So what you really get in this book are a lot of examples. Fortunately, Empson has a lively style, so 250 pages of examples is not such a bad thing!

The first challenge is that he is writing for a 1920s audience who definitely had way more background in classic English poetry than most of us do. The second challenge is that he's writing against a whole backdrop of assumed opinions, both about the appreciation of poetry in general and about specific poets, that are not necessarily the same opinions you'd get in English class today.

I expect this is a book I'll hold onto, so as I start reading these poets for myself, I can loop back and say -- hey, what did Empson say about this guy? do I find his interpretation plausible? do I agree with it? Until then, this book was quite useful for me as a whirlwind introduction to the history of pre-modern English poetry.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although many of the examples from 15-19th century poetry that Empson analyses seems hopelessly dated—it always amazes me that the Romantics were that romantic—his close attention to words and their various meanings is a good wake-up call. A reminder to pay closer attention to word choice. I won't pretend that I studied this book that closely, but I have found it great for browsing. Just picking up it up and reading a dozen pages, thinking about the multifaceted ways that words can be used. Already, though, Empson's work has given me a more sophisticated sense of what constitutes ambiguity and how it can be created (my sense of ambiguity was less broad than the seven types he offers). It also makes me ponder whether certain passages are ambiguous or merely poorly communicated. Or whether ambiguity exists because of an author's intent or by what the reader brings to the words. In the latter case ambiguity is easy enough to produce by using loaded words ("loaded" here is a good example of what I mean). An author may have a clear meaning in mind, but can count on readers heading in many directions regardless.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

The most annoying thing about this book is that as well as being one of the most famous most influential works of literary criticism of the entire century Empson wrote it when he was 21, an undergrad. I hate him

It's really good & Eliot stomps all up and down & WE challenges his criticism plenty as he should. A lot of it turns out as close analysis !! Which is lovely ! Like to wander over Donne always

I just can't get over that he wrote it then he's so fluent so warm it's exquisitely written so far as literary theory goes I refuse to think on't

[Clark Hays · Rating 4 out of 5]

“All my day is evening” — Ambiguity and How Poetry "Works"

William Empson was a noted British literary critic and poet. (Interestingly, he was apparently drummed out of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for the shocking crime of having condoms in his room. That’s their loss.) He went on to distinguish himself for writing and for exceptional and insightful literary criticism. His most influential work was his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, written at the tender age of 22! It’s a classic for a reason; he sets for himself the monumental task of understanding how poetry “works” — why, when done well, it moves us and sticks with us even though it was written in eras long past.

Why does he set out on this journey? Because “unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch …”

And scratch he does, penning an amazing, overwhelming and at times daunting work that dissects snippets and sections of well-known and lesser-known works of poetry and plays to find the source of their power. His answer? Ambiguity — “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”

Every single written phrase can be read differently depending upon this natural ambiguity of word choices, the intent of the writer and the social context in which it is being read. Because, “Any word can be either screamed or grunted, so if you have merely a word written on paper you have to know not only its meaning but something about its context before it can tell you whether to grunt or to scream.”

And poetry — condensed and distilled into almost pure essence — is especially open to interpretation. As he notes, “…the whole charm of the poem is its extravagant, its unreasonable simplicity.”

And also because: “The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it, and puts them together; weighting their probabilities in proportion to their nearness.”

Empson lovingly, cheerfully takes apart poems to try and explain how the various types of ambiguity fuel the whole creative endeavor. His efforts are so finely detailed, so exhaustive, I found myself at times skipping sections. Here’s an example that glazed my eyes:

“Ambiguity of the sixth type by tautology (not by irrelevance) is likely to fulfil the following rather exacting conditions: there will be a pun which is used twice, once in each sense, and the massive fog of the complete ambiguity will then arise from a doubt as to which meaning goes with which word.

But then, fearful of missing a point, I went back and reread every section I have given short-shrift. And it was worth the double efforts, because along with critical insights, he has some incredible turns of phrase:

“…only very delicate people are as tactful in this matter as the printed page.”

“…final ‘judgment’ is a thing which must be indefinitely postponed.”

“There is much danger of triviality in this, because it requires a display of ingenuity such as can easily be used to escape from the consciousness of one’s ignorance…”

“And that is why the practice of putting single words into italics for emphasis (again the Victorians are guilty) is so vulgar …”

“… a statement of the limitations of human life is a sort of recipe for producing humility, concentration, and sincerity in the reader …”

“… to recognise melancholy truths is itself, if you can be protected somehow, an invigorating activity …”

Seven Types of Ambiguity is a rich and rewarding read, and a wonderful reminder that — sometimes by intent, sometimes by instinct — good writing creates such a deep and powerful world worthy of analysis and introspection. But given the agile, curious mind behind this work, don’t think of it as a guide on how to be a better poet. That’s like reading a dissertation on particle physics from a distinguished thinker in the field and hoping it will help you change a flat tire. It may be well worth the read, and it will certainly expand your mind, but it will not help if you’re stranded on the side of the road.

In fact, trying to harness ambiguity — in poetry or creative writing — will likely only leave you with a final product that seems trite and obvious and obvious. And William Empson would almost certainly damn that with faint but well-turned praise.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poetically technical (or technically poetic) masturbation is still masturbation. And masturbating can condemn a man to hairy palms, sheer blindness, or even in some more incredible cases, Eternal Hell. All of this sounds horrifying and I want nothing to do with it!

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

early US formalism. displays the normal new criticism focus on textual 'complexity,' here the 'ambiguities,' but for author these complexities are an index of the writer's mind, which is something about which mature new criticism does not care--probably a nostalgia for earlier author-oriented writings.

[Lars · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helped me overcome my fear of poetry. It also put at my disposal the adjective "empsonian", an excellent modifier for the noun "ambiguity".

[Tad Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still dense, still hard to tell exactly what separates one type from another, still brilliant.

[Jim Elkins]

This is "reviewed"--used, I take in in Empson's spirit--in my book "Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?"

[r · Rating 4 out of 5]

“All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.”

“The more one understands one's own reactions the less one is at their mercy.”

[GwenViolet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Positive sort of "makes your head spin" writing.

By the conclusion I felt like I'd developed a lot of new theoretical means of thinking about poetry so that was neat.

[Laurence Thompson]

Reading Empson, who was only 24 when he wrote Seven Types, can be like encountering Sherlock Holmes amid one of his inductive spiels. The experience is amazing, bewildering, enlightening, intimidating, funny, and stupefying all at once. How does the detective conclude, as Empson does on page 178, that by "the ghosts of beauty glide/And haunt the places where their honour died" Pope intended to leave the door open to three pregnant prose paragraphs of potential meaning? Elementary: Empson has pre-empted the Derridean suspicion that there can be no meaning without the possibility of it being mistaken. That poetic language, its brevity necessitated by metre, is obliged to hold innumerable ambiguities within finite space.

As he grows more sure of himself, Empson becomes more irreverent. (Both in his arguments and, if you have a later edition, his footnotes defending his thesis from other critics since 1930.) The result is an improving book, which Empson ended a finer critic than he started, ready to take his place alongside Johnson and Hazlitt as one of the best critics of English poetry "not least," as Jonathan Bate pointed out, "because they were the funniest."

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to contain much sensitive analysis and a pleasant style, but I traversed it with the sense that I lacked the patience and refinement to take much away from it. Ultimately, the ending cheered me and serves as a better review than anything I could write:

"I should claim, then, that for those who find this book contains novelties, it will make poetry more beautiful, without their ever having to remember the novelties, or endeavor to apply them. It seems a sufficient apology for many niggling pages."

[c · Rating 2 out of 5]

turgid and baffling (e.g. one of his types depends on the process of the author, not on the text explicitly, but we are supposed to read this into the text—?), but his types of ambiguities are useful to think about, if nothing else.

[Jerry Wall]

Count me among the group that thinks this is a bit too much, too much verbiage, too much technicality, too much repetition. If one is interested in reading and rereading text . .. .
should be a good book for involved messages.

[Meghan]

Everybody knows there's seven types of ambiguity...or do they?...is there? Huh? As far as literary criticism goes, Empson's book is actually an enjoyable read.

[Georgie · Rating 3 out of 5]

fascinating and boring, illuminating and impossible

regardless; seminal

(rating of 3 stars is entirely meaningless/redundant)

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Empson defines ambiguity as any nuance in meaning which allows room for alternate reactions, and thereby generates what I would call “comprehension apprehension.” The advantage of ambiguity, he suggests, is it requires more from the reader, to conceive of something in a new manner, a paradigm shift, that may even eventually lead to self-understanding.

Unfortunately, as much promise as the title offered, I found it extraordinarily difficult to pull out seven, unique types of ambiguity, as they all seemed to blend and blur into each other.

In terms of his analysis of metaphor (which I had hoped might have been a category on its own!), he notes that metaphor is inherently ambiguous as it intentionally makes a comparison between two disparate things in the form of “one commanding image”, but leaves it to the reader to interpret the complexities of those similarities, not through lengthy analysis, but sudden (and therefore unpredictable) perception. Doubt, he says, is common to metaphor interpretation. Furthermore, all language he says is composed of dead metaphors, “the soil of corpses” which are not dead, but “sleeping” or “subdued” and need to be treated with care lest their latent connotations be woken / triggered.

He explicitly notes that the phrase ‘ambiguity’ is itself ambiguous, and notes that in recognising that a word / statement has several meanings, it is useful to be able to separate these meanings, but notes that it is “not obvious” that doing so is beneficial, or that it will solve more problems than it raises. Moreover, separate to basic interpretation, any individual word or phrase is altered, he says, like an ingredient in a stew-pot, when it is placed beside other words and phrases, in a particular combination, all held in suspension by a context-specific ‘juice’.

Inferentially, he seems to suggest that whilst we might assume that the ambiguity of ancient texts has increased over time, there is no way of truly knowing if in fact they have diminished, as our language grows wider and more inclusive, or else, our ideas become increasingly compressed (and consolidated, geo-politically and ideologically concentrated.)

Being ‘unambiguous’ Empson points out, has the advantage of being more direct, communicable, and potentially more durable. On the other hand, the idea of ‘unambiguous’ is “indefinite and treacherous” and as with all other concepts, throws up problems of what is conscious / deliberate. Empson suggests that whilst scientists and journalists attempt to ‘flatten’ language into jargon to simplify meaning, in general, language has always been “rich and dishevelled” and even where single meanings are implied, they in fact stand for “a vague and complicated mass of ideas and systems” in which the English language itself is an “aggregate of vocabularies,” which all combine to increase the ‘danger’ of accidental ambiguity.

Empson likens understanding to a chemical reaction in which there may be a mental ‘explosion’ when something suddenly makes sense, but notes there might also be reverse or subsidiary reactions, smaller “damped explosions” or slow burners, as it were, as well as ‘after effects,’ which all gradually accumulate towards the ultimate ‘reward’ of meaning acquisition. Although he uses a seemingly scientific metaphor to explain thought, he notes that the rules governing what is ‘conveyable’ are ultimately “mysterious.”

Even after writing a whole book on how to interpret poetry, like Susan Sontag, in her essay Against Interpretation, Empson suggests we need not interpret everything: “The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can”. In particular, aesthetic interpretations supply a gratification that generates “a sort of equilibrium” at your personal boundaries, thereby offering “a valuable imaginative experience” that ought not to be over-analysed.

Overall, plenty of interesting snippets, but it was a generally slow read, and I really wish he had explored the ambiguity of ambiguity more!

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

【An Unfortunate Book / William Empson / Seven Types of Ambiguity】

TW: This book is useful for a Shakespearean, but would no doubt enrage the fans of PB Shelley and William Wordsworth.

As Empson's precursor, TS Eliot, rightly predicted, Bertrand Russell was probably one of the most literarily valuable philosophers from the last century, because he paved the road to analyse the structure of languages in any shape. However, it was soon to except poetry from its scope by the time of AJ Ayer's "Language, Truth and Logic" at 1936: and that's the error to which the author of this book committed.

I'm saying this because this book was ignored the reason why analytics had already abandoned the aesthetic discipline - because ALL human languages, except for mathematical ones, are ambiguous.

Empson's distinction of poetry from prose is already problematic to reread now as we already know that even Instagram algorithm is based on a mathematical language. It is as childish as blaming Instagram for not showing our favorite reels all the time, because they are using some completely different languages from the ones we are usually speaking. And it's even more childish if we quoted Carl Sagan to show how Instagram algorithm is wrong, as you already notice.

It's an unfortunate book - the development of analytic philosophy was still in earlier stages while Empson was writing this book.

However, I must add one thing about this book in conclusion. It has great analyses on Shakespeare's sonnets. Even though its analyses on Shakespearean plays is not as great, but we must admit that Empson's attitude works on early modern sonnets.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like some archaic, ink-stained English professor out of some early 20th century novel, William Empson in his "Seven Types of Ambiguity" pours his brilliant, at times pedantic, at times sublime analysis of opaqueness in poetry into your receptive mind, the better to gain appreciation of the different shades of meaning as found in emblematic works of poetry in the English tradition. Dryden, Shakespeare, Spenser, Yeats, Hopkins, Johnson: they are all here in service of Empson's well thought out if verbosely explained categories of ambiguity. I gained greater insight into the language of all poetry, its complexity and allusiveness, than I have from any other literary criticism book that I have read in recent memory. So, while the conclusion is unnecessarily otiose, and he often does seem to get lost in the weeds of analysis sometimes, this book must be read because of its strength of analysis, it breadth of erudition and understanding, and its commitment to that most sacred of arts, poetry. A good read this is!

[josh patch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Copious, brilliant, and funny. His scheme of seven types is avowedly sketchy and he revises the criteria as he goes along. It’s hard to read at times due to Empson’s offhand style, but that seems to be intentional. He’s trying to demonstrate a method of criticism that brings to bear the array of unacknowledged mental habits that a poet exploits in a reader. He commonly refers to literary devices as “weapons.” This isn’t a systematic account of poetic meaning, it’s a working inventory of the poet’s arsenal. So the method is light, nimble, and evocative.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t rational, though. The book’s polemical purpose is to argue against a literary aesthetics of “pure sound” and show that the beauty of a poem is lodged in its meaning, it’s grammar. The first and last chapters show Empson considering the philosophical ramifications of his approach, and throughout you get lots of his hot takes on the history of poetry. Overall a rich book, and many of his readings have become loci classici for their respective poems.