Reprint of the ed. published by New Directions, Norfolk, Conn. in 1961.

The poems and poem fragments selected by Epson and Pirie represent the very best of Coleridges work. Many of Coleridge's poems are astounding successes, but for everyone of these there are also abysmal failures making it difficult for the layman to approach this leading Romantic without guidance. This volume contains the astounding successes, the guidance and none of the failures.

At the time of his death in 1984, William Empson was preparing and revising a collection of his essays on Shakespeare. The resulting volume, edited by David Pirie, provides a book which the literary world has wanted for over half a century.

Here, in a single volume, are major readings of "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," a witty and sometimes impassioned defence of Falstaff, and a new piece on the architecture of the Globe theatre and other Renaissance playhouses, in which Empson explores the problems that the design of contemporary stages posed for a working playwright; there are also essays on the...

This collection of William Empson's essays on drama is the second volume of his writings on Renaissance literature. Edited by leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, the contents range from essays on The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone and The Duchess of Malfi to a sprightly piece on Elizabethan spirits. In addition, there are several hitherto unpublished essays, including a magnificent, provocative new reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Throughout the volume Empson fights his own critical corner with unequaled zest, intelligence and insight.

This volume gathers some of William Empson's most passionate and controversial essays and includes previously inaccessible pieces on influential Renaissance writers and scientists. Introduced by leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, this is a book for anyone interested in the Renaissance, the history of science, and the history of literary criticism.

Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough by his own admission sometimes to see "stretched absurdly far," he launches into a brilliant discussion, under seven classifications of differing complexity and depth, of such works, among others, as Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Gerard...

Empson's poetry occupies a central place in 20th century literature. Acclaimed as the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). William Empson was applauded also for the dazzling intelligence and emotional passion of his poems. T.S. Eliot praised the brain power and intense feeling of his poetry; F.R. Leavis hailed him as the first true successor to John Donne. Other writers as diverse as W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman have admired his elegant, humane and moving work. Robert Lowell told Empson: I think you are the most intelligent poet writing in our language and perhaps the...

Passionate, controversial and illuminating this collection contains Empson's best short pieces on Shakespeare, a sally on George Herbert, a defence of Coleridge, and an eager introduction to a French farce, a group of incomparably witty autobiographical articles, and the text to his extraordinary Inaugural Lecture as Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University."