ABSTRACT
The later Empson tires of the sublime, which had never been very securely at home in his mental climate. The neo-classical moral sublime he had always considered a funhouse display of the mind warped into unnatural attitudes, while the sublime of indistinctness, with its thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, appealed to him only as a kind of imaginative consolation for his loss of confidence in the “tricks of the metaphysical.” But the argufying Empson really did hate muddles. He liked things clear and definite, and while he continued to mistrust the doxological pull of obvious solutions and received ideas, there is no doubt that the later Empson preferred his answers to scholarly riddles to have a hammering directness and simplicity. Although he had embraced difficulty in his poems, he had never tolerated the kind of obscurity that bespeaks mental bureaucracy, even in the atmosphere of Macbeth, as the poems themselves attest (“The creeping fog, the civil traps,/These are what force you into fear”: “Autumn on Nan-Yueh,” Collected Poems, p. 79). In the ivied cloister the equivalent of administrative dehumanization was “the high Mandarin guff of Eng. Lit.,” which Empson suspected of laboring obscurely, like a regional official, in the service of Christian dehumanization while keeping “the kids” from “going Red.”1
