Empson’s Shapes

Abstract When Empson did maths at Cambridge, before migrating to the English Faculty and completing his better-known degree in English Literature, the subject was in flux. Historian of the discipline Jeremy Gray associates the period with the rise of ‘modernist mathematics’, a collective impulse to question fundamental principles of the subject. Euclid began to wobble, new spatial dimensions (from the fourth upwards) were increasingly remote from human perception, and the vocabulary of abstract thought grew. This chapter’s focus is modernist geometry and its impact upon Empson’s whimsical games with shape in his poems, though less in their concrete presentation than in their internal syntactical mappings and virtual optics. I understand geometry as having developed into a place of whim for him when it ceased to be a subject he was studying. On the reader’s side, the invitation to think pseudo-geometrically may feel like a walk into a mathematician’s brain. You find yourself doing maths without knowing how.