“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” –William Butler Yeats
Thought of this statement when revisiting the British literary critic William Empson’s 1930 work Seven Types of Ambiguity. I had a better sense of Empson’s theories as a graduate student and frankly had to turn to Wikipedia now for a refresher.
Empson claims the first ambiguity is metaphor, which finds that things can be alike despite having different properties (I have heard metaphor described as using what you know to understand what you don’t know). The second is when two or more meanings can be resolved into one. The third is when two ideas can, through context, be represented in one word. The fourth is when two or more meanings don’t agree but combine to reflect the complicated mind of their author. The fifth is when the author discovers what is intended in the act of writing. The sixth (which seems Zen-like to me) is when a statement says nothing and leaves meaning to its readers (possibly in conflict with the author’s intent). The seventh is when two words, even within their context, are opposites and show a basic conflict in their author’s mind.
Two things come to mind. One is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” which seems like a statement about accepting ambiguity.
The second is that Empson’s ideas are an example of trans-Atlantic cultural cross-fertilization, a literary precursor of the “special relationship” between the U.K. and the U.S., because he was very influential on the New Criticism school of literary theory in the U.S. Again from Wikipedia, New Criticism was an approach to literature, especially poetry, that emphasized close reading of a literary work as a self-contained, aesthetic object. The movement’s title came from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics were also influenced by English formalist literary theorist I.A. Richards, and one of New Criticism’s best-known practitioners was T.S. Eliot, an American-born poet, playwright, and critic who migrated to England.