It is now seventeen years since the death of Sir William Empson, university teacher, literary critic, and poet, whose first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), is still his best-known. When he died, Empson had published five critical works, two volumes of poetry, and numerous periodical essays. Posthumously, an astonishing eight further books have appeared, collecting revised versions of the essays but also including substantial quantities of new material, particularly on Renaissance literature. The most recent addition, The Complete Poems of William Empson[1]—edited, like many of its predecessors, by John Haffenden, whose authorized biography of Empson we await as patiently as we can—contains fifty-five pages of introduction, one-hundred-and-seven of text (just over sixty items) and almost three-hundred of notes. There are relatively few additions to the previous Collected Poems (1955) so the book’s value depends heavily on its daunting editorial matter. One is bound to wonder why relatively short poems should need this much explication and to fear that they must be willfully obscure. Indeed Empson, who, like Eliot, provided some notes himself, was ready to concede that “No doubt the notes are partly needed through my incompetence in writing.” He also felt, however, that a virtue of modern poetry was its resemblance to a crossword puzzle, and that “a sort of puzzle interest is part of the pleasure you are meant to get from the verse.”

Such an admission can give hostages to fortune. “Aha,” said a colleague of mine years ago, coming upon me