7 Types of Ambiguity

Working on an Article about the Seven Types, presently on Third Read.

EMPSON if you can get through his chop chop, is extremely detailed in his targets.

Some write more like water seeping through, fluidically. Others its like lettuce and a chopper. Empson does some serious chop chop. His mind is moving so fast he is just trying to capture it and not let anything get by.

Tries, but ultimately takes little pleasure in organizing. And gives his opinion why what he is doing is likely to be defective, except that it isnt… it is what it is.

And in his justifications he goes off again, into sails of jibbing directions. Starting with shakespears macbeth, patterns of poetic word pile up and usage, searching to relay meaning, how grammar can be used as an ambiguity. OMG love that….

What of language and usage in poetry, is cast by author, as an ambiguity according to his expanded approach, and what exists loaded inside of it, via image metaphor allegory myth etc.

Its a heaping!

Am presently working on an outline for my “critical review” of his book. Cha. Ninety Percent of This is His

However I have shortened and combined sentences for ease of reading and identification of purpose.

As a person who is subject to rhyme as a force of nature, as exists for me in words as a way towards usage and meaning, I found Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, damn great rock candy. Following is link to the book:

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758

The SEVEN Types

1. When a detail is effective in several ways at once.

2. Two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one. 

3. Two apparently unconnected meanings are given, simultaneously. 

4. Alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind.

5. A fortunate confusion, as when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing.

6. The contradictory or irrelevant, so that the reader is forced to invent interpretations. 

7. Full contradiction, marking a division in the author's mind. 

Empson’s book presents a verbal analysis of poems from the English canon that engage with these ambiguities up to the impact of Freud, much of the work he examines is from the 17th century.

“T. S. Eliot, some while ago (speaking as a publisher), remarked that poetry is a mug’s game…”

NOTES

Preface

Empson sees machinations of ambiguity as among the very roots of poetry. And he extends his use of the word ambiguity to include nuance, pun and metaphor. Sees metaphor as the synthesis of several units of observation, in order to arrive at the expression of a complex idea.

Notes that English propositions are used in so many ways and combinations, that they present a body of meaning that can be said to be continuous in several dimensions.

Chapter 1

Sound and Meaning