His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930. (accessible via scribd)
Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".
Seven types
- The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.
- Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.
- Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.
- Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.
- When the author discovers his idea in the act of writing. Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.
- When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.
- Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author's mind.
