William Empson

"Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men."

"Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis."

"The plain fact is that many of the reputations which today occupy the poetic limelight are such as would crumble immediately if poetry such as Empson's, with its passion, logic, and formal beauty, wer…"

"The waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it m…"

"To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public."

"Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills."

"Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson are the greatest English critics of their respective centuries not least because they are the funniest."

"An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful....any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece o…"