Empson biography

Sir William Empson (September 27, – April 15, ) was an Englishcritic and poet, reckoned by some to be the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt and fitting heir to their mode of witty, fiercely heterodox and imaginatively rich criticism.

Jonathan Bate has remarked that the three greatest English literary critics of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are, respectively, Johnson, Hazlitt, and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest." Empson has been styled a "critic of genius" by Sir Frank Kermode, although the latter has lamented his lapses into what he regards as willfully perverse readings of certain authors, and the scholar and critic Harold Bloom has confessed that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him, in particular, because of the force and eccentricity (Bloom's expression is "strangeness") of character as revealed in their critical work.

Empson is often associated