A Poet Duly Noted

The English edition of The Complete Poems of William Empson was reviewed by Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books under the sly headline "William Empson: a most noteworthy poet." Empson liked to append his own notes to his poems, and even as a young man, he asked when entering negotiations with a publisher, "If I publish a volume of verse with notes longer than the text, as I want to do, will that be a prose work or a verse one?" Add to the author's own notes the glosses and historicizing of the book's editor, John Haffenden, and you have a book with nearly three times the length of commentary as of text.

The book is divided into four broad sections: ninety-four pages of introduction, acknowledgments, bibliography and dating; 107 pages of poems; seven appendixes; and a further 266 pages of notes. I like very much poet Roy Campbell's view that "in the notes you meet Mr Empson himself, and that is a charming experience."

To judge by the good humor and diffidence of the notes, and the many letters and other private texts quoted here, Empson does seem to have been a charming man. (His notes on the poems are distinguished from Haffenden's by boldface type.) Where Haffenden's notes are expository and biographical, Empson's are quite enigmatic and puzzling--in his three-page note to the three-page poem "Bacchus," Empson wrote: "Columbus...once puzzled people about how to stand an egg on its end; the answer was to crack the shell. He is Humpty Dumpty the egg and a foam omelette because wisdom via drink requires breaking eggs..." and so on.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.