How this close reading approach helps the reader to understand ambiguity as a positive literary influence can be demonstrated by analysing William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’. Within these abstract constraints exists a transcendentally dimensional poetical ‘space’, yielding more room to encounter Empson’s ‘alternative reactions’ than might appear upon first reading. This definition may appear worryingly vague, but the prerequisite for maintaining contextual relevance to the text guards against undisciplined or meretricious readings. Empson’s interpretations of ambiguity in poetic language revolve around a central point that ambiguity as Empson defines it ‘is any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’. William Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ provides a significant introduction to literary theory for the new critical reader.
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