Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” (3). “these reasons, and many more…must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. “The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once” (2).Įmpson finds nine ways to read Shakespeare’s line “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” and each is effective. Ambiguity is, for Empson, “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
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