William Empson first swam into my ken in 1930-31 while I was reading for honors in the English School at Oxford. I cannot remember how I first heard of him: perhaps through his association with I. A. Richards, whose work I had discovered on my arrival at Oxford in the autumn of 1929.

I devoured Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism and his Practical Criticism. I was fascinated with what he had to say about the workings of language, and though I did not like his positivism and his psychologistic vocabulary I had to admit that he was telling me more about the inner workings of poetry than I had ever heard anyone tell before.

In the excellently selected open-shelf English literature room in the Bodleian Library, I easily located Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and sat down to read it. But I made the mistake of starting at the first page to read the book through. I quickly became bogged down in Empson’s attempt to differentiate between his various kinds of ambiguity and put the book aside.

I did not read it through until 1938. In the meantime I had come home, had begun to teach at the Louisiana State University in 1932, and in 19 34 had been joined there by Robert Penn Warren. In 1936 we issued our first textbook, An Approach to Literature, in which we offered analyses and discussions of poems, stories, plays, and essays. In 1938 we published Understanding