G. S. Fraser, in a recent version of Eliot's view about 'true poetry' and communication, applied to Empson's poetry as read aloud a sensible distinction: 'Empson's broad semantics in poetry (the planting and repetition of words with a strong emotive charge) enable a listener to stop worrying about the narrow semantics, and to be carried on by the authority of the tone and the wonderfully effective … rhythms' [William Empson: The Man and His Work]. But this should not cause the reader of the printed text, also carried and impressed by the 'broad semantics', to ignore the undulations above which he flies and which give his course its contour and direction: in Empson's own words, 'You think the poem is worth the trouble before you choose to go into it carefully, and you know more about it when you have done so.'

Such an assumption—that poetry which...