Professor of Poetry Lecture 8: 'Legal Fiction' and Legal Fictions
Delivered 05 March 2013
Those who attended these lectures in the first two years of my tenure may recall that I readily admit to the presence of an intellectual bias in their composition. That is to say, I am a committed high modernist, even in my reading of the Tudor poets or of Pope. I am a freak survivor in a post-modernist cultural context, a kind of holy fool. My function is to make you laugh, even while I inwardly weep. Like another sentimentalist whom disappointments turned vicious, Ezra Pound, I proclaim that the three abiding energies of poetry are melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia. Increasingly addicted, like Pound, to paranoia I find that while valuing melopoeia (‘cadence’), phanopoeia (‘image-making’), it is questions of logopoeia, the ‘dance of the intelligence among words’1, that affect the pattern of my inward and outward debate. If I give preeminence to logopoeia in my personal poetics, I do so for its power to call the other two faculties into its service.
There is purpose behind this preamble. I intend to try to persuade you, over the five years of my tenure, that we are currently experiencing a language crisis, comparable to that which struck english literary culture in and after 1534, the year of the Henrician Act of Supremacy and the Treason Act, whereby dissent, expressed by words alone, could be deemed an act of treason punishable by death. A mid-20th century parallel could perhaps be drawn with the crisis of German culture, and the nazi distortion of the German language between 1933 and 1945, thence with the correlative yet wholly antithetical deployment of neologism and parataxis in the post-war poetics of Paul Celan, tactics deriving directly from that murderous crisis. It would be nonsense to maintain, nor do I maintain, that our very lives are threatened by the things we say. Even so, one would be ill-advised to use Twitter when angry and drunk. And we still regard Salman Rushdie’s predicament as a chilling exception to an imagined civilised and liberal rule. The crisis I am adumbrating would not have been found astonishing, I dare to say, by Thomas Wyatt or the Earl of Surrey, or certain of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, such as Thomas Kydd. With glaring exceptions, our lives are not at risk in the matter of words, though livelihoods may be; and one may get by, if not on, by becoming a professional fool. The Tudor household fool, Sir Thomas More's family employed one, still thrives in the Chair of Poetry at this university, though one is even now chastised for numerous unspecified breaches of etiquette. Speaking ill of the BBC’s higher echelons may be one of them.
As some of you have heard me remark on previous occasions, because I don’t go online in any way, I think and work almost entirely by serendipity. Serendipity works by the rule that the book which is to change your life stands next on the shelf to the book that you had come to take out from the library, and which as often as not turns out to be a dud. You must envisage me then reading and writing from the centre of a small, intense radiance of apprehension, a miniature vortex of intuition. For someone as excited as I am by the proximity of language, words appear all the time as if they were three-dimensional. They not only strike you; they rear up and strike you. I should also say that I don’t possess a photographic memory, quite the opposite. I suggest rather that mine is a palimpsestic memory. A single word that strikes it on page fifty will strike it again on four hundred and fifty, or in the pages of a different text entirely. Perhaps resonating memory is a more apt phrase of description.
I am leading up to asking myself, in your presence, why did the word ‘deem’ rise up and strike me some short time ago in such a way that thence forward it would resonate with the strength of its original encounter. ‘Deem’, the word itself, was not before a certain point of contact, a term situated within my own lexicography. At some point, quite recently, in my reading of Elizabethan hermetic and esoteric prose, not exactly pub lunch reading as you will appreciate, I sensed a nimbus of sorts, a kind of hovering suggestion that if I thought about this something interesting and profitable might come. I was reading Philip Sidney’s first Arcadia (1590), in which Pyrocles, cast on the shore of Phrygia, is led captive to the king. A prince, ‘wickedly sad, ever musing of horrible matters’, paranoid if you will, who ‘though in truth wrongly, deemed his unsuccess proceeded of their unwillingness to have him prosper’. He deemed ill of others through his sick, paranoid imagination. In a work contemporaneous with Sidney, Robert Southwell’s An Humble supplication to her Majesty, first published 1600 but dated 1595, the year of its author’s martyrdom, one of the greatest surviving pieces of Elizabethan prose, we encounter this characteristic challenge:
‘Yea, if to be a Priest made by th’authority of the Sea of Rome, and present within your Highnes dominions, be a just title of Treason: if they that relieve, harbour, or receive any such be worthy to be deemed felons; then all the glorious Saints of this land (whose virtue and doctrine god Confirmed with many miracles) were no better then Traitors, and their Abettors felons’
R Southwell, An Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie, Cambridge University Press (1953), p. 29
What happens here I can best describe as a reciprocating electrical tremor between the word ‘just’ and the word ‘deemed’, so that if ‘just’ outside this context stands for justice, ‘deemed’ means something else, mere opinion cloaked as justice, a particularly malign sub-type of legal fiction, or at the best, in phrases such as ‘deemed not to swerve very far from the tenderest Rules of native Courtesie’ implying taken to be so by superficial persons persuaded by opinions rather than the truth. This is language on a hair-trigger; and great poetry is always on a hair-trigger of sorts. The entire brief treatise by Robert Southwell is an intricate play on truth as treason, and the distortion of rightful semantics by means of brute force majeure. Characteristic phrases in that piece of Southwell’s implying ‘to deem’ include sentences like ‘generally accounted men whom it is a credit to pursue, a disgrace to protect’ or ‘yet must we only be accounted unnatural’ or ‘by a special proviso ordained’. Southwell employs once the verb ‘sooth’ which had nothing to do with soothing, but meant to maintain or put forward a lie as being true. Southwell’s piece of pleading is entirely characteristic of one strand of Elizabethan mission prose; compare Edmund Campion’s Challenge to the Privy Council (1581). This is the strand that proclaims the desired grace of equity - equity is gracious and calls for gracefulness to invoke it whereas the voices of the prosecuting authority are noisy and ugly with falsehoods, naked and unproved words, bruited about. If you look up the word ‘to deem’ in the 1989 second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, you discover that ‘to deem’ means for the most part ‘to judge’. The implication that it might signify to form an opinion merely enters the list of definitions at Sense 6, where it is ‘to form the opinion, be of the opinion, judge, conclude, think, consider’ though one must also take in Note A ‘that these significations are venerable, originating prior to 800’ and secondly that they compass what the OED terms the ‘ordinary, current sense’.
As is evident from that brief glimpse of the Elizabethan examples, ‘to deem’ in Southwell’s as in Sidney’s usage is to judge malignly, on false evidence. The OED, which I customarily find more than adequate to my critical and exegetical needs, is somewhat unsustaining in this crux. One needs a number if supplementary aids, such as Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary of Words and Phrases, words and phrases legally defined, and Jowitt's Dictionary of English Law, where I find this;
‘Generally speaking, when you talk of a thing being deemed to be something, you do not mean to say that it is that which it is deemed to be. It is rather an admission that it is not what it is to be deemed to be, and that, notwithstanding that it is not that particular thing, nevertheless it is to be deemed that thing’
Well, this may strike you as vaguely familiar. It is comparable to the whole joy of Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871), works which delighted and fascinated William Empson. The final chapter of Some Version of Pastoral (1935) is devoted to these two books. Apart from opportunities for the comic, the roots of deeming, like the roots of equity are set adjacent to the malign. I wish to try to persuade you, though some will need no such persuasion, that the malign is root and branch of what we glibly term the human condition, and my aim has to succeed if I am to attempt to vindicate my contention that we are currently experiencing a language crisis as drastic as that which struck with the Act of Supremacy imposed by Henry VIII. Note I say as drastic as, not identical with; I mean to imply an equivalent level and intensity of the malign, not absolutely the same form of the malign. Looking into case law, and the case of law, as understood in Tudor England, I find that in formal terms it is necessary to distinguish legal fiction from cavilling, or cavillation.
‘Cavillation’ OED: ‘The use of legal quibbles so as to overreach or defraud, hence chicanery and overreaching sophistry.’
Cavillation is said by one of the authorities I have consulted to be dangerously close to legal fiction, the implication being that whereas legal fiction may be the assumption made that something false is true in the name of equity, cavillation is the assertion that something false is true to justify either torture, or expropriation, or condemnation to a traitor’s death. Saint Thomas More was condemned by an act of cavillation, the perjured affirmation on oath by Richard Rich that More had said something treasonable to him on oath, something that More also under oath denied that he had said. Ian Maclean, in his book Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The case of Law (1992), quotes a passage from the latin, from Cicero I believe, which being translated reads ‘Everyday familiar speech will not remain coherent if we chase after words between ourselves’ while conceding that ‘chasing after words’ takes place in courts of law on a daily basis2. The lecture podium is not a court of law, nor do I think it likely that I will be racked by anything other than self-doubt for anything that I say here, yet to anyone who has attended these lectures it must be equally evident that I am pleading a case and cause, and that I desire my plea and my pledge to be taken to the highest level.
‘The poem is the cry of its occasion,
part of the res itself and not about it’3
Is that a piece of cavillation or a snippet of legal fiction? Does it move us by its helplessness or by its swagger? By both simultaneously I would suggest - we are moved by a compound-articulation simply affirmed, as we are by these lines from Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920):
One substance and one colour
Braving time.
Which simultaneously presents us with the fragility and the tensile strength of 17th Century English lyric poetry, considered as a model worthy of emulation at the beginning of the 20th century. I’ve previously put the question elsewhere, forgive me if I repeat it, what is ‘braving time’? It is to challenge, to defy with a tincture of bravura, the display of daring or defiance, brilliancy of execution as in a passage or piece of music requiring great skill and spirited execution, written to tax the artist's powers. We are all braving time with each breath we take and poetry at its best has a seismographic connection to this muscular reflex that is simultaneously an endless recalibration of thought and feeling.
You may be aware, if you are not you very soon will be, that I am a most jealous lover of great poetry. Whether in the period of the Tudor monarchs or in the great days of high modernism during the 20th century. I take attacks upon it with savage personal resentment as if these were slanders and denigrations against my close and intimate kin. I consistently argue that in 2013 the harm that I fear comes from within, from the belief, or rather the habit of thought, that in order to survive in an age of commodity the art of poetry must itself become a commodity, that is to say, a vehicle of entertainment somewhere between someone's idea of a standup comedian in a scout hut, and a sex-hangup agony column in a free newspaper.
Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
Your well fenced out real estate of mind
No high flat of the nomad citizen
Looks over, or train leaves behind.
Your rights extend under and above your claim
Without bound; you own land in Heaven and Hell;
Your part of earth's surface and mass the same,
Of all cosmos' volume, and all stars as well.
Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell's
Pointed exclusive conclave, at earth's centre
(Your spun farm's root still on that axis dwells);
And up, through galaxies, a growing sector.
You are nomad yet; the lighthouse beam you own
Flashes, like Lucifer, through the firmament.
Earth's axis varies; your dark central cone
Wavers, a candle's shadow, at the end.
Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos or ‘whosoever has exclusive right to the land possess also the rights above and beneath the property’. This very old legal formulation became actually a very important legal consideration during the vast Victorian expansion of coal mining, while in the earliest days of flying General Pitt-Rivers brought down with his elephant gun a lath and canvass aeroplane, killing the pilot. He was acquitted of murder on the plea that the plane was trespassing on his land. And it was necessary to have this piece of legal fiction abrogated when mass civilian air travel and satellite technology became an everyday occurrence.
These aspects are pithily and wittily set out in a very recent essay on Empson’s poem published in Essays in Criticism in late 2012. The author is Marcus Waithe4. My own remarks draw largely on this piece, and add nothing new. As a slight gesture though, in the vague direction of specious originality, a piece of my own legal fiction, I can perhaps say that the theme of Empson’s poem is one that would not have crossed my mind in any imaginative craze that I might have undergone, to assay for myself as a piece of formal verse. And a reason that I adduce for this occlusion is ‘class’ (C-L-A-S-S - the whole notion of class, they tell me, is defunct, so I thought I should spell it). Empson was the youngest child (the youngest child used not, except in catastrophic circumstances, to inherit) of Arthur Reginald Empson, of Yokefleet Hall in the East Riding of Yorkshire, landowner and squire. Had I been brought up close to Yokefleet hall, I would have touched my forelock to squire Empson, and so would my father, whose first job after leaving school at thirteen was that of gluing labels on large tins of jam, some of which, family legend maintained, accompanied Scott’s last expedition, and whose adult working life was spent as a village bobby in Worcestershire. Our local equivalent to squire Empson was Colonel Morecambe, of the clock-house near Bromsgrove, a house where A E Housman, poet and classical scholar, had passed a number of his most formative years. And the Colonel’s son Christopher was a school fellow and first great unrequited love of Alan Turing. My father, as I now visualise it, would of course not have touched his forelock to the colonel because it would have been concealed by the peaked rim of his helmet. He would have performed the ritual gesture exactly as it was performed by PC Dickson of Dock Green in the 1950s cinema and television, by touching his straightened fore-finger to his helmet peak - ‘E’vning All’ - and if my father had happened to be on that stretch of his beat on Christmas eve, the Colonel no doubt would have bestowed on him the compliments of the season in a most genial and paternalistic manner.
In old fashion gentry enclaves like rural Worcestershire, squirearchy was still very strong, but beginning to fossilise in that odd transitional decade of the 1950s. In the same year that might have seen my father standing to attention for his hegemonic blessing, I arrived with the filthy blessing of British Railways, in Oxford, where I would be addressed as a gentleman on the college notice board, and as ‘sir’ by my scout. The difference between myself and a lefty critic-comedian at this point, Empson was of course both lefty and comedian, is perhaps this - that rather than castigating the Yokefleet squire’s son’s high-handedness as a critic poet, with references to his characteristic peremptoriness of critical tone and pseudo-vatic obscurantist utterance in poetry, and attributing these to the near instinctual sense of privilege pertaining to scions of the English squirearchy, and thereby condemning it, I am more inclined to rejoice in his ability to have his way with the language of proprietorship, as one of several available possibilities in aid of a richly variegated poetical and critical verbal range. Nor do I feel deprived that I have been by hereditary circumstances denied access to this undeniably significant area, this proprietorial range of denotation and connotation. More grist to everyone’s mill, I say! Or more grist to all of goodwill!
Among the matters that one might reasonably expect to be raised and resolved in the course of considering the poem’s range of humane reference, I would maintain that Christopher Ricks’ priorities are about as right as you can get. And what Ricks says is this:
‘Does poetic order correspond in any detailed way to social order? What sort of regime is maintained in a particular verse structure and does one enter it as a tourist or as a tax paying citizen?5
These are questions that are worth asking and attempting to answer, even though at some level these reasonable questions sometimes become vertiginous. The significance to me and I do not doubt to some like-minded others, of Rick’s questions, is that one can sense them resonate as much in the poetry of Wyatt at the Court of Henry VIII, as in and to the poetry of Empson, or Auden, or Louis MacNeice, or Ted Hughes, or Philip Larkin.
I ought at this point to say more concerning Empson’s ‘Legal Fiction’, though I have conceded that Marcus Waithe’s recent discussion has admirably pre-empted mine. For Waithe I would say Empson’s poem has a double nucleus of implication. The first of these may be semi-anecdotal, and Waithe picks up the point from Empson himself, who by the time of his death had left a vast number of annotations to his own poems, in various places. Empson is probably more amply self-annotated than any other 20th century poet I can think of, though I see somebody shaking their head and I may be wrong. Empson’s father was a Yorkshire landowner who actually did, as he grew older, get more and more puzzled by the belief that some wicked coal mine was sending tunnels under his land. The equal part of the double-nucleus comprises what Waithe calls ‘metaphysical connotations’ which lead us away from the legal and material emphasis to mental ‘effects’ and ‘affects’. Waithe’s phrase, for me, opens into a vista of manifestations and implications, all of which turn on the matter of what rhetoric, and its major subdivision, poetics, is and what it is for. If you take any major poem and describe it as closely and accurately as you can, its ‘effectives’ - metre, rhyme scheme, tropes - and its mental ‘affects’ occur, or show up, with an effect of breathtaking naturalness, as matters pertaining both to the poem itself as a formal structure and to the imaginative position in which the poem enables us to position ourselves. And how and why the verbal ‘effectives’ and ‘affects’ cleverly engineered by the son of a Yorkshire landowner should so command the delighted attention of the adolescent son of a Worcestershire police constable, so that the adolescence oik was allowed to feel that he had been granted access to a domain of equitable potentiality, is a question that for a space of sixty years has not ceased to enthral me. It is some of that enthralment, in my notoriously pedantic way, that I am trying to communicate in these lectures.
Waithe would remind me that there is still much to be said of ‘Legal Fiction’. We see then a strain of peculiarly Empsonian thought here, implicated in the strands and fibres of the language:
Your rights extend under and above your claim
Without bound; you own land in Heaven and Hell;
And
Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell's
Pointed exclusive conclave, at earth's centre
The poem was first published in 1928. Had I been the twenty-two year old William Empson, I would have forced myself to undertake an immediate re-write, horrible though that job is. I could not have borne, after a weeks reflection, the fact that in order to drive home the pseudo-logic of the legal fiction, one had to repeat the rhyme words ‘hell/well’, ‘hell’s/dwells’ in consecutive stanzas of a four stanza poem, each stanza having four lines rhyming on the ABAB pattern. Nor would I accept the defence that Empson repeats the word to demonstrate his belief that christianity has hell on its brain; I would fear not accusations of blasphemy, but accusations of poverty-stricken invention. I would surrender the ethos to the technic, which in the end, I think one has to do, and when one has done that one finds that the ethos has been saved after all.
It is true, as Empson never ceased to make clear, his religious belief that christianity was a mental concoction of deliberated demonic evil, a perpetuated fantasy of gloating sadism, and his ‘Legal Fiction’ is, among other things, a satirical strutting of this mad punitive pseudo-logic, as if in the formula - Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos - some fear-crammed child had mistakenly read inferos as infernos. Therefore, according to such moral mis-logic, damnation as the inevitability of a euclidean theorem, and the equally groundless contention that your claims astronomically expand, merely correlate your imperium with that of Lucifer. Empson’s poem has a macabre, jokey power provided that we acknowledge it as effectively dated by its very selection of its area of moral concentration as being a 1930s parody of three hundred or more years of terrorist theology, and maybe 60 odd years of Marxist anti-capitalist diatribe. Real estate is iniquitous capital, it is also in some hereditary fashion, the echo of Charles Wesley’s evangelical pleading, ‘nor leave me in my lost estate, nor curse me with this want of love’, where ‘estate’ means first, mortal condition subject to divine penalties, and second, Adam’s freehold in Eden, forfeited by original sin.
When Wallace Stevens writes the ‘The poem is the cry of its occasion / part of the Res itself and not about it’ the ‘occasion’, as I’ve always taken it, is not the occasion in the sense of, for example, a marital breakup, so much as it is the desire of an utterance to be itself, and the ‘Res’ is the ‘thingyness of things’ into which the achieved poem is taken up, more than it is any post-traumatic raison d’etre. Strongly evident among the numerous vocal protests raised against the view I just expressed would be the voice of Empson himself. He would have dismissed my opinion as not amoral so much as rankly immoral. He was in manner though not in practice highly litigious, he fought his corner, ethically speaking, with forceful, acerbic wit and as if for equity’s sake he would not hesitate to level charges against himself, as in his spoken commentary to his own selection of poems, preserved on an LP disk:
‘I want now to give a poem called The Teasers because I think it was nearly very good, above my level altogether. But I feel its final form is rather a cheat, with the solemn last verse giving a moral that the poem hasn’t earned. I wrote a lot of other verses, and cut them out, rightly I am sure. But I ought to have got better ones. I can’t say what this poem means, partly because I don’t remember, partly because I don’t want to, and partly because it doesn’t matter, since the poem failed to say it. It is very tempting in this kind of poetry to put in a moral at the end, in suitably ambiguous terms, and hope that it will sum up the conflict.’
The poem in question, comes probably late or latish in Empson’s truncated or foreshortened lyric oeuvre. It was first published in 1940, which is late for him, and is reckoned as being among his finest. He must have sensed and recognised its value at some level of his being and been satisfied. There is something either self-rebuking or self-effacing in this openly self-asserting and dogmatically inclined poet and man. I am reminded, most oddly since Empson was a vehement atheist, of an older contemporary of Empson’s father, Charles Gore, first Bishop of the newly created diocese of Birmingham, consecrated in 1905. High Anglo-Catholic in terms of belief and practise, left-leaning in terms of civic and national politics, who was firm in rebuke and even more so in self-rebuke. It was a form of noblesse oblige (Gore’s ancestry was of the peerage rather than the squirearchy), and such a type would offer its resignation if it believed some serious criminal or even non-criminal impropriety had occurred on its watch. Holders of power no longer do that; it is a real and massive shift or slide in cultural ethos.
Empson is a profoundly significant transitional figure. Hung-over Victorian radical ethics politically, yet angrily contemptuous of Victorian etymological theology - he would say ‘bad etymology, and bad theology’ - he was scornful of the punitive semantics of the reverend Richard Chenevix Trench, founding father of the Oxford English Dictionary. Empson was himself the author of The Structure of Complex Words (1951), a major treatise on the interrelation of historic etymology and public and private ethics. Gore wrote that humanity was depicted by Shakespeare as ‘gripped by great and ruinous passions, the burden of which could not be shaken off, and which by a sort of irresistible natural law conveyed Mankind to his doom.’6 And it is fair to claim, I suggest, that Empson’s ‘Legal Fiction’ play seriously, though in a wittily po-faced manner, with the notion of humanity conveyed to its doom, as being gripped by a sort of irresistible natural law, which in this poem Empson imagines as the legal fiction that whosoever owns property owns the earth beneath down to hell, and the sky and space above the property out to where Lucifer totters in his pride. It is, as I say, a po-faced joke about Marxist indignation as much as about the hideousness of Calvinist penal predestination, but also about aspects of the human personality or character, that are beyond a joke - greed of possession, hunger for status, aped in Empson’s poem by the use of the Miltonic hellish word ‘conclave’, a mingling of false propriety with things proprietorial.
Marcus Waithe’s essay, to which I have made reference, must be read, and I have to state a personal gratitude to him for dealing gently with a critical obtuseness of mine, perpetrated fifty years ago minus twelve months. In 1964 I was already 32, but wrote literary criticism like a dim sixth former. I am a late developer, which is why I take this job so seriously. A sophisticate wouldn't; so attend, you won’t hear lectures like this again! I am not fully persuaded after all that what Dr Waithe terms the ‘metaphysical connotations’ in Empson’s poem lead us away from legal and material emphasis to mental effects and affects, as if this involves some change of textual and textural complexion part way through the address. I should say that Empson pitches things high, semantically speaking, from the first line on, and that the textural complexion of his poetry is always fairly ruddy. It all really comes down to a matter of turning psychological distress into technic, into matters, real problems, of technical stress. It’s no good having emotional stress if your technic is out. Yeats said that to Margot Ruddock, without technic you having nothing to drive you down under the surface, ‘difficulty is our plough’7.
When I first read this poem, many years ago, in particular that last stanza beginning ‘you are nomad yet’, my reaction was not that of someone merely watching or hearing the wind-down process of a bit of legislative pseudo-logic. I felt that I was also being promised or offered something, and that the promise was involved in the very nature of poetry itself or, more broadly, with the potentiality of eloquence as an adjunct to one’s need for reassurance on the related issues of inheritance and survival. If, after the last line of that poem, you could have seen a name, not William Empson, but your own - G. W. Hill, lower sixth - would the rawness of being have been taken up into the governed and governing measures of structure, of structural adumbration and closure? As Marcus Waithe says in that essay published last year, the most satisfactory way of proceeding with the poem would be to consider it as a meditation on the worldly power of imagination. I agree, though I would add that his suggestion would relate equally well to certain great sonnets of Shakespeare and Sidney, and to Yeats and Wallace Stevens writing at their best. You can argue, and perhaps Waithe would wish the proviso made, that in the first three stanzas Empson is more clinically skeptical than I here allow. The public moral imagination must be somewhat stunted that can be dealt with only in the language of a macabre cosmic joke. That is, have we the benefit of a legal fiction, or the crass impediment of a threatful cavillation. If that is so I would still put money on the bet that when false security is broken, and your possessions are gained from under you, nomad, to believe that the difficult poem you have conceived and carried through to its terminal pseudo-logic may yet project even as much as a candle’s shadow, is some token of stoic immortality, albeit an adumbration. Empson is very good with final adumbration:
Winter will come and all her leaves will go.
We do not know what skeleton endures.
Carry at least her parasites below.
That is from a poem called ‘The Ants’. ‘It is meant to be a love poem’ Empson said much later in 1957.
Stars how much further from me fill my night,
Strange that she too should be inaccessible,
Who shares my sun. He curtains her from sight.
And but in darkness is she visible.
This latter quatrain brings to an end Empson’s ‘To an Old Lady’, also a poem of 1928, the year the poet turned 22. So much of the poems that we respect Empson so greatly for writing were written in his early 20s. The old lady portrayed here is Empson’s mother, the somewhat formidable matrona of Yokefleet Hall. Many years later, in 1977, in the course of a BBC Radio 3 reading and conversation, Empson delivered a touchingly affectionate reminiscence in which he recollected that the old lady, his mother, who considered his being a poet a waste of his abilities, nonetheless said of this particular poem ‘the poem about granny, William, now that showed decent feeling’. Of course, Empson is at times deliberately provoking, but it is a serious provocation. He is seriously provocative in the way that some of the most courageous 19th century ethical writers, like T H Green, were provoking. In a letter editorially dated 1973, he enters a staunch defence of A C Bradley, who in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Empson says ‘always see a human situation in the round, thus becoming a uniquely good critic of Shakespeare, who does the same’8. Empson’s major difference with Bradley involves what he terms the elder critic’s ‘pietistic view’ that Lear dies of a passion of joy, merely because to accept that he dies in a reversion to despairing rage is a possibility that most later cultural timidities find insupportable.
So to conclude, Empson is a great critic, and a splendid minor poet, who set himself to learn a style from a despair - and who with some minor exceptions, that appear merely perkily bright, admirably succeeded. But there is one last thing I have to say with reference to two other English poets. On the nature and condition for despair, both Robert Southwell SJ and Gerard Hopkins SJ, would indict Empson and myself of gross and flagrant heresy - they would say that our despair is mere disappointed hedonism, that we are not dissenters from, but accessories to, the carnal narcissism of our time; that, rightly considered, despair is the final, unforgivable state of self-will, achieved by people who yet understand that the will of God is real and final. All other understandings and manifestations are mere dyspepsia of the ego. Regard this as, in Tom Nashe’s phrase, ‘Lenten Stuffe’.
See ‘How to Read’ in T S Eliot (ed.), The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, Faber & Faber (London), p. 25
See I Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law, Cambridge University Press (1992), p. 140
From Cicero’s Pro Caecina:
Sermo hercule et familiaris et quotidianus non cohaerebit, si verba inter nos aucuparabimur. Denique imperium domesticum nullum erit, si servulis hoc concesserimus ut ad verba nobis obediant, non ad id quod ex verbis intelligi possit, obtermperent
Why, everyday familiar speech will not remain coherent, if we chase after words between ourselves: there can be no authority in the home if we concede to our most junior servants that they may obey us in the letter of our words, and not comply with that which can be properly inferred from our words
See W Stevens, The Collected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens, Library of America (New York), p. 404
From ‘The Auroras of Autumn’:
‘The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,
Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind…’
https://academic.oup.com/eic/article-abstract/62/3/279/598030
The Ricks quotation is originally from a piece entitled ‘Flicking Through’ in The Listener, 86 (28 Oct 1971, p. 591) in which he reviewed Jonathan Raban’s book The Society of the Poem. Hill does not mention that Empson wrote a rejoinder to Ricks in the next edition (The Listener, 86 (25 November 1971)), which is included under the heading ‘Jonathan Raban: A contretemps between we and Christopher Ricks’ in J Haffenden (ed.), Selected Letters of William Empson, Oxford University Press (Oxford), p.515
This may have in fact been written by Gore’s biographer George Leonard Prestige - see G L Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman, William Heinemann (London), p.514
Yeats to ‘Margot Collis’ the stage name of Margot Ruddock, in early April 1936; a key critical touchstone for Hill:
‘You do not work at your technique. You take the easiest course - leave out the rhymes or choose the most hackneyed rhymes, because - damn you - you are lazy … when you technique is sloppy your matter grows second-hand; there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface. Difficulty is our plough'.’
J Haffenden (ed.), Selected Letters of William Empson, Oxford University Press (Oxford), p.550
Wonderful, but does it end there?