Empson, is that a frog in your pocket or....

[William Zantzinger]

With this stunning debut as a critic, Empson
legitimized ambiguity as a positive quality of
literary texts without giving up authorial intention,
and this achievement made him a powerful force in
modern theory. Critics quickly protested, however,
that his focus on short texts slighted the complete
work; that he ignored the relations among poetry,
history, and ideology; that the human needs satisfied
by poetry were lost in intricate formalist
explication; that his approach valued ambiguity too
highly as a measure of merit; and that he detected
ambiguities too easily.
     Empson defended his method twenty years later in
"The VerbalAnalysis" (in Argufying), explaining that
for him analysis is a valuable function of
criticism, that he begins with an intuitive sense of
the worth of a work and proceeds
to study its complexities, and that lack of complexity
is not necessarily a bad thing in a text. Moreover, he
supported the authority of the author's mind,
asserting that whenever a reader fails to make sense
of a text, then it is the reader's own fault and not
the author's. Consequently, Empson scorns theories
that dismiss the writer's intentions because they deny
"spontaneous contact" with the author's mind
("Intentional" 435).
   Although he defends the author's intention
repeatedly....

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/william_empson.html

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