"[6] In addition to Empson the fellows included John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, Arthur Mizener, Allen Tate and Yvor Winters.

Occasionally Empson brought his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as well as the poems of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and Joyce's Ulysses.

Empson is today best known for his literary criticism, and in particular his analysis of the use of language in poetical works: his own poems are arguably undervalued, although they were admired by and influenced English poets in the 1950s.

The universal recognition of the difficulty and complexity (indeed, ambiguity) of Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 ("They that have power ..."), for instance, is traceable to Empson's analysis in Some Versions of Pastoral.

Thus, for instance, Empson remarks in the first few pages of Some Versions of Pastoral that: Gray's Elegy is an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas:

The tone of melancholy claims that the poet understands the considerations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges against them; the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death.Empson goes on to deliver his political verdict with a psychological suggestion: Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the "bourgeois" themselves do not like literature to have too much "bourgeois ideology".Empson also made remarks reminiscent of Dr Samuel Johnson in their pained insistence: And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy.

Indeed, Empson consistently ridiculed, both outrightly in words and implicitly in practice, the doctrine of the intentional fallacy formulated by William K. Wimsatt, an influential New Critic.

As Frank Kermode stated: Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, in a pious moment, attempt to "recuperate" a particularly brilliant old-style reputation by claiming its owner as a New New Critic avant la lettre – Empson in this case, now to be thought of as having, in his "great theoretical summa," The Structure of Complex Words, anticipated deconstruction.

Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem's badness in fact function in quite the opposite manner.

I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious.

His high regard for the metaphysical poet John Donne is to be seen in many places within his work,[10] tempered with his appreciation of Buddhist thinking, an occasional tendency to satire and a larger awareness of intellectual trends.

In reviewing this work Frank Kermode commended Empson as a "most noteworthy poet" and chose it as International Book of the Year for The Times Literary Supplement.

Empson's manuscript of a major work outside literary criticism, The Face of the Buddha, begun in 1931 on the basis of often gruelling research across many parts of the Buddhist world, was long thought to be lost, but a copy miraculously turned up among the papers of a former editor at Poetry London, Richard March, who had left them to the British Library in 2003.

According to the publisher, Empson 'found himself captivated by the Buddhist sculptures of ancient Japan, and spent the years that followed in search of similar examples all over Korea, China, Cambodia, Burma, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in the great museums of the West.

Compiling the results of these wide-ranging travels into what he considered to be one of his most important works, Empson was heartbroken when he mislaid the sole copy of the manuscript in the wake of the Second World War.

...that curious trick of pastoral which for extreme courtly flattery – perhaps to give self-respect to both poet and patron, to show that the poet is not ignorantly easy to impress, nor the patron to flatter – writes about the poorest people; and those jazz songs which give an intense effect of luxury and silk underwear by pretending to be about slaves naked in the fields.

Literary uses of the problem of free-will and necessity, for example, may be noticed to give curiously bad arguments and I should think get their strength from keeping you in doubt between the two methods.

I suppose that in Satan determining to destroy the innocent happiness of Eden, for the highest political motives, without hatred, not without tears, we may find some echo of the Elizabethan fulness of life that Milton as a poet abandoned, and as a Puritan helped to destroy.On Celine's Journey to the End of the Night from Some Versions of Pastoral: Voyage au Bout de la Nuit...is not to be placed quickly either as pastoral or proletarian; it is partly the 'underdog' theme and partly social criticism.

The two main characters have no voice or trust in their society and no sympathy with those who have; it is this, not cowardice or poverty or low class, which the war drives home to them, and from then on they have a straightforward inferiority complex; the theme becomes their struggle with it as private individuals.

This change is masked by unity of style and by a humility which will not allow that one can claim to be sane while living as part of such a world, but it is in the second half that we get Bardamu speaking as Celine in criticism of it.

...before claiming the book as proletarian literature you have to separate off the author (in the phrase that Radek used) as a man ripe for fascism.From "The Variants for the Byzantium Poems" in Using Biography: ...she appears to end her penultimate chapter 'Was Yeats a Christian?'

with the sentiment that he must have been pretty Christian if he could stay friends with Ezra Pound.From "Ulysses: Joyce's Intentions" in Using Biography: When I was young, literary critics often rejoiced that the hypocrisy of the Victorians had been discredited, or expressed confidence that the operation would soon be complete.

This is often called fearless or unflinching criticism, and one of its ill effects is to make the young people regard all literature as a terrific nag or scold.