One mind, many ideas

In 1927, at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., a young man called William Empson regaled his teacher I.A. Richards for a while with multiple interpretations of a Shakespearean sonnet, Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame. After they were finished, as Richards wrote later, Empson asked his teacher: "You could do that with any poetry, couldn't you?" Richards, a leading critic of the day and among those who established the English department at Cambridge, asked his student to go ahead and do it. In a few weeks, Empson showed Richards the draft of a book which became one of the defining works of English criticism in the 20th century. Called Seven Types of Ambiguity, it presented poetry as complex structures with multiple meanings, at a level no one had done before. What began as a literary game had morphed into a grand theory of poetry, and by extension of all literature. It was the beginning of an academic movement called the New Criticism.