New Impressions XX Seven Types of Ambiguity

Abstract

WILLIAM EMPSON’S SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY is one of those books that most professionals in literary studies have heard of, but fairly few, as it turns out, have actually read.1 Those who have done so tend to be of the generation educated in the period when ‘New Criticism’ was dominant (roughly speaking, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s), a movement with which Empson is often associated – to some extent correctly and to some extent incorrectly.2 I am a member of that group and have asserted at various times and to various persons in the course of my academic career that Seven Types is ‘the best book ever written about poetry’. However, it occurred to me recently that I had not sat down and read the book, cover to cover, in decades, perhaps since I first read it. I had used it in teaching particular lyric poems and particular passages in Shakespeare’s plays, and had defended a controversial section of it in print, but had not actually read the book itself, as such, in all that time.3 What follows is a ‘report from the field’ that can serve as an account of what rereading, or simply reading, Seven Types of Ambiguity now is like. It should also make clear why I continue to maintain my high regard for the book and would argue for its special relevance to literary studies now, when historicism and formalism are no longer seen as at odds, when Theory has moved from ‘high’ to ‘low’, and when ‘close reading’ is being considered and (often) defended – but without set protocols.4