Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

In 1925 Empson won a scholarship to Magdalene College Cambridge where he read Mathematics gaining a First for his Part I but a disappointing 2. i for his Part II.

Jonathan Bate has said 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. His best-known work is his first Seven Types of Ambiguity publiWilliam Empsond in 1930. ".