![]() ![]() The seventh category of ambiguity in his book occurs when the two meanings of a word "are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer's mind". He was at once a literalist and a Freudian theorist. ![]() Empson brought an extraordinarily paradoxical mind to bear on English poetry: on the one hand, he assumed that poetry was a form of rational thought, and could be paraphrased, argued with, and briskly laid bare (and Haffenden shows that there were plenty, like John Middleton Murry, who objected to Empson's analytical clarity, preferring that poetry be kept in the cupboard of the unconscious like some outlandish but revered family heirloom whose function is no longer understood) on the other hand, Empson was so sensitive to ambiguity, to multiple meanings and contradictions in a poetic line or even a single word, that he went a long way towards crediting the indeterminacy, even the undecidability, of meaning in verse. ![]()
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