When Sir William Empson died in 1984 in his seventy-eighth year, he had published four books of literary criticism (Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral, The Structure of Complex Words, and Milton’s God), a Collected Poems, a long introduction to a selection of Coleridge’s poems, and a quantity of miscellaneous periodical essays. Subsequently, another nine books have appeared, gathering the essays, many extensively revised, with some hitherto unpublished pieces including, as recently as last year, a completely new book, The Face of the Buddha, long lost but rediscovered in 2005. In addition, John Haffenden, who edited many of those posthumous volumes, has published a two-volume biography (2005, 2006), a hefty selection of Empson’s letters (2009), and a full-dress annotated Complete Poems (2001). (For the poems and the biography, see The New Criterion for October 2001, May 2005, and February 2007.) We now also learn that an annotated edition of the four books Empson published in his lifetime, together with related materials, is in preparation from Oxford under the general editorship of Seamus Perry.

In this short study, Michael Wood has had to be highly selective in his coverage.1 There are odd leisurely digressions; I suspect he is trying to emulate Empson’s freewheeling manner, but there isn’t room for that (or, apparently, for an index, which is a pity). Keen to present Empson not just as a critic and poet but as a writer, he is as