William Empson is primarily remembered for his famous critical work seven Types of Ambiguity. This is his first and most influential work. It appeared in 1930, and again, heavily revised and enlarged, in 1947. There have been only three books of criticism since, and two very slim volumes of neo-Metaphical verse largely written in the thirties. There are only two chief pre-occupations of the New Criticism-Verbal and structural. The Seven Types represents rising 'stages of advancing logical disorder'. The ambiguities merge from the use of words.
With his second critical book, some versions of pastorals, his interest shifts to the total meaning of whole works, with many evidences of powerful Marxist and Freudian influence. Empson himself admits that his Marxism in the thirties and later was more serious than his writings reveal. The some versions assumed the class- analysis of society and the ideal status of the 'proletariat', though the frankly admits that the book is 'not solid piece of Sociology'. He say that pastorals is one of the conventions out of which 'ambiguity' emerges because it consists in 'simple people expressing strong feeling in learned and fashionable language.
With his third book, The structure of Complex words (1951) Empson returns to verbal analysis of an even more rigorous kind than that of 'seven types'. He says, "I think a critic should have an insight into the mind of his author, and I don't approve of the attack on "The Fallacy of Internationalism."
Of all the English critics, he is the most variously ingenious and the readiest to make new ventures. His mind sparks off original ideas with frightening rapidity.
