SOURCE: "Cheesespreadology," in London Review of Books, Vol. 18, No. 5, March 7, 1996, pp. 26-7.

In the following excerpt, Sansom discusses Ammons's critical reception in England.

In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had 'Just a Smack at Auden':

     What was said by Marx, boys, what did he
                                              perpend?
     No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end.
     Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend,
     Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end.

By contrast, in a lecture on 'Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry' to the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961, Empson gave William Carlos Williams and his reviewers an exasperated wallop:

The most unexpected American critics will be found speaking of him with tender reverence; they feel he is a kind of saint. He has renounced all the pleasures of the English language, so that he is completely American; and he only...