The Royal Beasts contains works of Empson's previously unpublished or published long ago and very obscurely. There is a short play, an unfinished novel, a ballet scenario and a batch of poems, all early. It is the third posthumous volume and much the most important, though a fourth - a collection of essays on 17th-century poetry and drama - is promised for 1987. Since it will presumably contain Empson's essays on Donne, which have a peculiar centrality in his work, this final volume will be needed for any considered estimate of a writer much honoured by fellow critics (at any rate in England) even when they found him most exasperating. However, it will hardly match The Royal Beasts in interest.

LRB 20 November 1986 | PDF Download