Poetry
Empson's poetry is clever, learned, dry, aethereal and technically virtuosic—not wholly dissimilar to his critical work. His high regard for the metaphysical poet John Donne is to be seen in many places within his work, tempered with his appreciation of Buddhist thinking, an occasional tendency to satire, and a larger awareness of intellectual trends. He wrote very few poems and stopped publishing poetry almost entirely after 1940. His Complete Poems is 512 pages long, with over 300 pages of notes. In reviewing this work, Frank Kermode commended him as a 'most noteworthy poet', and chose it as International Book of the Year at the TLS.
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“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
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