The Simplest Type of Ambiguity

 Notes from Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, published 1930. (for background on Empson, see Fry, Lecture 6)

Empson, quoting Herbert Read as a starting point:

"...metaphor is the synthesis of several units of observation into one commanding image; it is the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, not by direct statement, but by a sudden perception of an objective relation."

Empson: 

"The simplest type of ambiguity is...that a word or grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once." (emphasis mine).

This definition of ambiguity "covers almost everything of literary importance."

Examples discussed for this type of ambiguity:

The "bare ruin'd choirs" in Shakespeare Sonnet LXIIII.

"...the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry."

Empson provides an illustration of ambiguity in poetry in how we tell young students that "one day you will understand this poem." It doesn't mean that the student lacks information that can be provided to him. It means that the person cannot yet apply his own life experiences to the poem in a suitably ambiguous way to bring the poem to life inside one's mind. Young people don't have enough appreciation of ambiguity.

Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.

Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".