Essays on Renaissance Literature. Volume One

Easy grace," William Empson wrote of one of John Donne's love poems, "takes a lot of struggle. . ."(p. 173).He might have added, "So also does attentive critical reading."Struggle, in the first instance, with other critics whose refusal to contextualize their readings beyond quite narrow limits permits a reimposition of orthodox pieties upon canonical texts that demand a much fuller range of responses; and struggle, as well, with textual critics and editors whose masking of ideological prejudice as bibliographical principle lends further authority to the effacing of textual and historical complexities.As John Haffenden testifies, the easy grace of Empson' s essays on Donne -their casually elegant turns of phrase, the manner in which a seemingly inconsequential accumulation of perceptions is suddenly revealed as adding up to an argument of almost syllogistic rigourwas the result of sustained hard labour, of pushing his thoughts, in many cases, through a dozen or more revisions.If the process by which Empson composed these essays was ceaselessly iterative, their cumulative impact is also, in another sense, iterative.Although the essays gathered here date from 1949 to the last decade of Empson' s life (he died in 1984), they are recurrently concerned with defining ever more clearly his reasons for resisting the dominant tendencies of mid- to late-twentieth-century criticism and textual criticism of Donne.Empson was determined to break what in his 1974 Clark Lectures he called "the iron rule of T. S. Eliot men"those who followed Eliot in insisting that Donne was "no sceptic" (I, 4).He was equally opposed to Allen Tate's claim that Donne "knew nothing ... of the later open conflict between the two world-views, science and religion" (p. 5),to Rosemund Tuve's reduction of Donne's astronomical conceits to a catalogue of tropes ("rather like," as Empson says, "spare parts of machinery" [p.6]), to Frank Kermode's view that the "new philosophy" serves in Donne's love poems

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