William Empson: Some Versions of Pastoral

William Empson (1906-1984), poet, critic and essayist, is most famous for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, begun while he was in Cambridge undergraduate. After a stint teaching in Japan and China, he worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War, afterwards returning to China for a longer stay. He was a professor of the University of Sheffield between 1952 and 1971, and was knighted in 1979. His other notable works include The Structure of Complex Words and Milton's God. Collected Poems was published in 1955, and his Complete Poems was published in 2000 by the Penguin PressSeamus Perry is Professor of English Literature and Massey Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford. His publications include Coleridge and the Uses of Division and Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection, and, co-edited with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Tennyson Among the Poets (all OUP).

Some Versions of Pastoral has an implicit (occasionally explicit) commitment to interpreting literature as an aspect of 'social conflict', recognizing that the genre of the pastoral has an ideological function: to represent 'the beautiful relation between the rich and the poor'.

• Editor's IntroductionSome Versions of PastoralPreface to the 1974 editionI: Proletarian LiteratureII: Double PlotsIII: They That Have PowerIV: Marvell's GardenV: Milton and BentleyVI: The Beggar's OperaVII: Alice in WonderlandAppendix 1: Related Writingsi: THe Negation of Negation (1927)ii: Elizabethan Rogues (1930)iii: To I.A. Richards (1932)iv: Mrs Dalloway as a Political Satire (1932)v: Introduction [to T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays] (1933)vi: Some Versions of Pastoral (1935)vii: Pantheism and the new Astronomy (1936)Appendix 2: James Smith, 'On Metaphysical Poetry'CommentaryTextual NotesCorresponding page numbers in the principal editions of Some Versions of Pastoral