The Underside of American history Book

Empson argues that ambiguity is a central device of poetry, and that it distinguishes poetry from other forms of writing. For him, writers such as William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope and John Donne regularly employed the ambiguities of sense and syntax as a way of giving expression to highly complex ideas.

Most of the book is analysis of examples as Empson supplies multiple readings of words and phrases from various poems in order both to define the different types of ambiguity and to substantiate his assertion that ambiguity is a significant literary device. For some, Empson's close readings may seem like an instance of reading too much or too deeply into the poems; for me, though, the level of attention Empson gives to the language of the poems he analyzes is appropriate, particularly as he is discussing the work of writers who were intensely word-conscious (and insofar as Empson is trying to prove that ambiguity is a dominant device in English poetry, he really cannot avoid reading rather closely the poetry he discusses simply in order to make his point).

In addition to analysis of examples, the book includes more theoretical and even philosophical commentary on ambiguity. In the first chapter, in a great show of reasoning, Empson defends his assertion that ambiguity is a significant poetic device; this is followed by a discussion of the relation between sound and sense in poetry. In his chapter on the seventh type of ambiguity, Empson employs the discourses both of psychoanalysis and of symbolic logic, and in his conclusion he distinguishes between the appreciation and the analysis as two dominant forms of poetic criticism.