This is the second and final volume of John Haffenden’s epic biography of William Empson (I reviewed the first for The New Criterion in May 2005). Once again, Haffenden marshals a wealth of detail into a narrative always fresh and engrossing. The last four decades of William Empson’s life took him from propaganda war work for the Far Eastern unit of the BBC, to a British Council lectureship at the National Peking University, where he remained throughout the civil war and well into the communist regime; thence back to his native Yorkshire and a seventeen-year professorship at Sheffield before a productive retirement. The writing went on unceasingly: major books—The Structure of Complex Words (1951) and Milton’s God (1961)—massive essays, new and revised, on Donne, Marvell, and Coleridge, among others, a projected book on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and much else, all of which Haffenden edited after Empson’s death. He has now also been allowed to print the long, unfinished, and unfortunately not very good poem “The Wife Is Praised,” one of the few which Empson wrote after those in The Gathering Storm(1940). It celebrates the unconventional sexual life Empson shared with his turbulent wife, Hetta, a South African artist whom he married in 1941. Although their mutual devotion is unquestionable, both had lovers (Empson’s were of both sexes) who sometimes lived in the house, and at one point Hetta took off for a year with the father of her illegitimate son, an arrangement Empson accepted with