[The] significance of Empson's criticism is this: his criticism is an attempt to deal with what the poem "means" in terms of its structure as a poem. To sense its importance, one must recall what the critic in the past has attempted to do: either he attempted to find the goodness of the poem (and its status as poetry) in terms of its prose argument—and in terms of the "truth" of what was being said—and thus made poetry compete with philosophy or science; or else he tried to find the poetry in the charm of the decorative elements—in the metrical pattern, in the sensuous imagery, etc. Often enough, of course, he tried to combine the two, usually in some formula which amounted to defining poetry as "truth appropriately embellished."

Empson fights throughout the [Seven Types of Ambiguity] against this crippling division by showing how poem...