Friday, Aug. 10, 1962

Scratching at Beauty

MILTON'S GOD (280 pp.) -William Empso -New Directions ($5).

Ever since Shakespeare wrote the sonnet They That Have Power to Hurt, people thought they knew what it meant. But in 1935 a young British critic named William Empson told them they did not. The sonnet, he announced, contains 4,096 possible meanings. He then presented some of them by showing the sonnet's ambiguous use of words, metaphors and punctuation, by finding half-buried references to Machiavelli and King Solomon and even prophetic hints of Oscar Wilde. Literary criticism has not been the same since.

Empson became the grand panjandrum of the New Criticism, which claimed that a work of literature could best be understood by a detailed analysis of its language. Other critics have had profounder things to say about literature than Empson, but in line-by-line analysis no one can match him. One of the most labyrinthian explications of a poem on record is his 26-page analysis of Andrew Marvell's 72-line Thoughts in a Garden, in which, among other things, he lists every time the word green is used in Marvell's poetry. Green, he argued, meant hope and virginity to Marvell and "the humble, permanent, undeveloped nature which sustains everything, and to which everything must return."

Ambiguities out of a Hat. Empson brought a mathematician's mind to literature. He studied mathematics for four years at Cambridge before he switched to English literature, found he could tick off literary analogies as effortlessly as the multiplication tables. Before long, his tutor recalled, Empson was plucking meanings from poems "like rabbits out of a hat." He was still only 24 when he published Seven Types of Ambiguity, which examined microscopically not only Shakespeare, but also much of English poetry, uncovering layer after layer of ambiguity in works that had been considered perfectly clear. Not even the simplest lines escaped Empson's scrutiny. After reading Lovelace's lines, "Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage," Empson debated for a page whether walls did or did not, in fact, make a prison.

Empson has written only sparsely since. He taught in Japan, then in China, until the Communists drove him out in 1952, and he returned to Britain to teach at the red brick Sheffield University. He wrote two more books of criticism and some poetry, which, as might be expected, is filled with calculated ambiguities.

Poetry Without Pleasure. But Empson's latest work, Milton's God, a vast retreat from the crisp analysis of his earlier writing, is less literary criticism than a diatribe against Christianity. Empson fears that literary criticism has fallen into the hands of T. S. Eliot and the "neo-Christian movement." which judges all literature from a Christian viewpoint. Empson finds Satan a more likable character than God in Paradise Lost. Milton's God is "astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin" down to "flashes of joviality" and "bad temper," writes Empson. He tortures angels and mankind for his own amusement. Satan, on the other hand, behaves like a democrat toward fellow fallen angels, and Eve he finds a great lady in the tradition of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Empson's endless explications are often ingenious, just as often capricious. "Unexplained beauty always arouses an interest in me," Empson once irreverently wrote, "a sense that this could be a good place to scratch." By close analysis, Empson has washed away many misreadings of poetry; by showing how varied and inventive poets are, he has often made them more exciting. But he may also frighten off readers who translate his lesson as: if you think you understand a poem, there is something wrong with you -or the poem. As a result, many a reader has felt that poetry was less a pleasure than a test, and decided not to bother with it at all.

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