Before William Empson died on April 15, 1984, he prepared a volume of essays he called Using Biography. It has since appeared in England and now in this country. Empson had not published a single book since Milton’s God (1961), which was something of a studs de scandale. (God in Paradise Lost, he told us, is “astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin” and the poem is “horrible and wonderful: I regard it like Aztec or Benin sculpture or the novels of Kafka”) One knew that Empson had published many articles since then, but they were scattered over English and American periodicals and it was difficult to form a clear picture of his work of the last twenty years. Thus a collection of essays of his own choice is most welcome.

Using Biographyis ostensibly held together by Empson’s attention to the use of biography in criticism and by his aim of refuting “the Wimsatt Law . . . which says that no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author.” But this formulation of the “intentional fallacy” completely misrepresents its meaning. W. K. Wimsatt did not forbid the use of biography and history in the study of literature; he used them both all the time himself. The intentional fallacy means something perfectly sensible and defensible: that the mere declared intention of an author is no valid criterion for judging a work of art. The many misstatements writers have made about their intentions prove the point. This