Empson on Smart

I'm not particularly fond of William Empson--especially the early work, which many people not overfond of him (fewer than you might think) are willing to admit isn't as good as the looser, wilder, later stuff--but at certain times his eye, his ear, his strident way of characterizing what is going on in a poem is indispensable, even if misguided. He produces "strong readings" of the minutest details--if I can say that, the oxymoron not shading too much into paradox. Take Empson too seriously--as seriously as he takes himself (he is, after all, patron saint of ambiguity, never irony--and there's something useful and refreshing about that too)--and you won't be able to get his particular emphasis on a word out of your head for years: people are still unable to escape Empson's influence in their approach to Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, even if they dismiss his tenuous jab at history via the "bare ruin'd choirs" in Seven Types of Ambiguity--it's his immense control of the mind-blowingly complex intersection between phrasing (even just the grammar), metaphor (not the leaves, but the time is the vehicle to be extended!), and form (not to mention the famous, sublime numerical puzzle of the sequence some, none, few) in the three lines prior ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold") that makes Empson's sort of daring on the following line possible and probable. But then, if you take him skeptically, realize that specific phrasings are elements over which we interpreters indeed have the most control, and place him beside other readings, knowing that his chief skill is in grasping the many possible active alternatives that a poet could have taken but didn't--if you realize all this, he becomes extremely enlightening, thus reduced in scope and definitiveness, though not in wit, insight, and concision (see the absolutely unbelievable "like dancing in heavy skirts," below). The problem is only that Empson in particular--but the poet more generally as he or she confronts a critic--has a way of bullying you into thinking that you never really have known much about the small-scale inner workings of language, but have only moved at some higher, less concrete level in your deepest scrutiny and exactest attention. Thus, we get statements like this one:

The mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice. [...] It is an easy-going device, often used simply to fill out a play, and has an obvious effect in the Elizabethans of making you feel the play deals with life as a whole, with any one who comes into the street the scene so often represents; this may be why criticism has not taken it seriously when it deserved to be.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 27

The claim, really, is that there are two types of notice--and perhaps more essentially, two types of neglect. But even the most formalist sort of critic--the one who looks so often for the functional upshot of this sort of thing, how it adds to the whole--doesn't employ any different sort of gaze than the uncritical (in the descriptive sense) gaze, and doesn't have any sort of neglect that is qualitatively different than the uncritical neglect. We just look at things or don't look at things for different reasons. This doesn't mean we notice or fail to notice different things. To say otherwise is not only to commit a logical injustice, but also to be more like Richards--always supposed to be so much less sophisticated than Empson--than Richards himself: he, at least had the good sense to confer upon such perspectivized poems an objective psychological existence. And many who uncritcally (here in the perjorative sense, the sense in which it means something descriptively different) love these strong-minute readings of Empson, these "quaint opinions wide," indeed are willing to say otherwise with their hero. In short, most good statements about literature in general precisely involve the sort of neglect or semi-notice that Empson says the critic always misses, too busy murdering to dissect (here in more way than one: what's faulted is--just to be clear--a lack of attention that does not, Empson assumes, allow any subsequent notice, when his gaze will, when not noticing, at least admit the feature in question). What's not noticed here, indeed, is that criticism precisely tries to talk about this "dim and undetermined sense," and moves from it--and much more often than the non-critical, I'll add--to its statements. In short, as usual, it's a straw man here: the non-critic or the uncritic or even the poet simply is using the same gaze, and has the same dim appreciation--which is no less able to be worked up into notice--of the double plot. But why this is particularly offensive--why it would just have to be otherwise, with a difference in kind--I'll never quite understand: indeed, there are different kinds of experience involved in creation or enjoyment as opposed to analysis, but experience is something different than attention, and it is criticism that allows us to actually reinforce the connection between the two, rather than crudely assert and reassert their identity.

Nevertheless, you want Empson to say these sorts of things, as they foster his deep sense of the internal workings of the poem, and spur him on to stronger and stronger readings. It's just that you have to brush these "bland words" away--along with the tired general sentiment to which it gives voice.

So with that said, I have no qualms of just quoting another--this time brilliant--bit from Some Versions of Pastoral, where Empson is, if not right, then attuned to something really excellent about Christopher Smart's (amazing, as with all of Smart's works) Song to David in his chapter on (or about, or around) Marvell and what he calls "the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it":

This grand theme too has a root in magic; it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong, one would think, among the mountain climbers and often the scientists, and deserves a few examples here. I call it the idea of the Hymn to David though being hidden behind the religious one it is nowhere overtly stated, except perhaps in the line

Praise above all, for praise prevails.

David is a case of Orpheus-like behavior because his music restrained the madness of Saul.

His furious foes no more maligned
When he such melody divined,
     And sense and soul detained;

By divining--intuiting--the harmony behind the universe he "makes it divine," rather as to discover a law of nature is to "give nature laws," and this restrains the madman who embodies the unruled forces o nature from killing him. The main argument of the verses describing nature (or nature as described by David) is that the violence of Nature is an expression of her adoration of God, and therefore that the man of prayer who also adores God delights in it and can control it.

Strong the gier eagle on his sail
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
     Emerges, as he goes.

But stronger still, in earth or air
Or in the sea, the man of prayer
     And far beneath the tide.

The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 120-1.