Editing William Empson (section)

== Verse ==
Empson's poems are 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,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://charleswhalley.tumblr.com/post/10609984030/metafiddlesticks-eliots-donne-and-the |title=a style from a despair. – 'Metafiddlesticks!': Eliot's Donne and the Possibilities of the Neo-Metaphysical Speaker, 1917–1935 |publisher=Charleswhalley.tumblr.com |access-date=23 April 2012}}</ref> 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 poems almost entirely after 1940. His ''Complete Poems'' [edited by [[John Haffenden]], his biographer] is 512 pages long, with over 300 pages of notes. In reviewing this work [[Frank Kermode]] commended Empson as a "most noteworthy poet" and chose it as International Book of the Year for ''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]''.