Turning Point / The king of ambiguity: Passionate, teasing, often perverse, the poet and critic William Empson refused to lie down before smug orthodoxy. Paul Taylor celebrates his life and writing

The nun's face had gone the colour of an angry erection and it was I, apparently, who had sent the blood rushing there. 'You horrible little boy,' she exploded, ordering me out to the front. It was the religious instruction period at my Catholic primary school and the nun had just asked the class a tough one: why, she enquired, should we pray for the souls in Purgatory? My hand had shot up, 'Please Sister, because we'll be in their position one day ourselves' - an answer which I thought managed to incorporate the fetchingly modest assumption that we would not be sailing through the pearly gates straight off. I waited to be patted on the head.

Instead, I found myself grabbed by the ear. 'We should pray for the souls in Purgatory,' she announced, as I writhed in her grip, 'because they cannot pray for themselves]' It flashed across my mind, at that moment, that from a group as young as we were, only a congenital prig could have come up with the answer she wanted. It also struck me for the first time that, as interpreted by the nun, there was something unsavoury about the divine plan. A mean trick, if the release date of the suffering souls in Purgatory was dependent on the unreliable intercessions of the living.

I'd like to be able to claim that, at that very instant, I turned rebel. But it would be truer to say that, thoroughly abashed, I went back to wanting a career in sainthood. But something deep down in me had changed and awaited definitive external endorsement. You can imagine therefore my gratification, some 11 years later, when I came upon the following passage: 'As for myself, when I was a little boy I was very afraid that I might not have the courage I knew life to demand of me; my life has been pretty easy so far, but if some bully said he would burn me alive unless I pretended to believe he had created me, I hope I would have enough honour to tell him that the evidence did not seem to me decisive. I dare not despise Satan for making this answer.'

The passage comes from Milton's God by the great critic and poet William Empson (1906-1984), a book which tilts with magnificent scorn (and, at times, magnificent wrong-headedness) at a religion based on the worship of a torturer. I remember having to stifle bouts of delighted laughter as I sat in the university library engaging with the bluff comedy of the book's swipes at Christian doctrine. The idea, say, that the blessed up in heaven derive a bonus of bliss from contemplating the torments of the damned becomes, in Empson's wonderfully honest and incisive account of it, a despicable matter of sitting holding God's right hand and gloating while the devil piles a few more faggots on poor old mum. The spirit of this passionate, often perverse book offered a source of liberation.

The big artistic turning point in my life came somewhere between these two moral watersheds; again, Empson's work was crucial, and again, I found myself reflecting on the tricky business of courage. For a long time, when I was a boy, 'nature' had got in the way of me and poetry appreciation. I was an urban child and it was as if, so to speak, I couldn't see the poems for the wood and the trees (and the skylarks and the daffodils, not to mention Ted Hughes's animals). The great breakthrough occurred when I was about 15 and, while idly browsing in Kenneth Allott's Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, chanced on Empson's marvellous 1937 poem 'Aubade'.

From the arresting informality of the opening lines ('Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. / My house was on a cliff. The thing could take / Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row'), I knew that here was the sort of poetry I could do business with. The situation it dramatised was, superficially, quite as foreign to my experience as drooling over daffs. An earthquake somewhere in the Far East disturbs the sleep of a couple you deduce to be an English expat and his native lover. The jolt also reveals that it's not just in literal terms that their relationship is on shaky ground. The poem suddenly widens its frame of reference from the immediate pragmatic problems facing them (if the girl stays put, her family will find out she's having an affair) to the instabilities of the international situation which render a relationship between 'two aliens' movingly vulnerable to the fact that it may be only a matter of time before their countries are at war.

The condition it explored of being in two minds at once was one I understood very well, though, and what 'Aubade' sent across to me with the force of a revelation was the sense that poetry offered the most pithy and profound means of expressing what it's like to live straddling between unresolved contradictions. Through the discrepant clang of its alternating refrains ('It seemed the best thing to be up and go' and 'The heart of standing is you cannot fly') and in its moments of charged wordplay, 'Aubade' powerfully teases out the ambiguous nature of courage.

Entranced by it, I spent a long time pondering the poem's difficulties and I'll never forget the thrill of its dawning on me, after much puzzling, that the word 'heart' in the second refrain could mean either mere neutral 'essence' or if you take it as a pun 'what is essentially brave', so that the statement is both a banal truism (with the implication that staying put may look like courage but is just a succumbing to the inevitable) and a resonant tribute to the principled defiance of standing your ground. Sometimes, the poem intimates, honourable men find themselves in situations where it is hard to distinguish one state from the other.

Obviously, I couldn't have put it like that at the time, but my early encounter with 'Aubade' enabled me to apprehend on a fumbling level some of the insights I was later to derive, as a sixth-former, from reading Empson's astonishingly precocious Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a critical work which, with dazzling ingenuity, analyses poetry so as to show that its double meanings are not muddles but perhaps the only honest way of recording the complexities of experience.

I later found out that Empson's brilliant Cambridge career had been cut short when contraceptives were found in his room. A lucky break, perhaps, for his long academic stints in the Far East - first in Japan and then in China, where he got caught up in the Great March from the invading Japanese and had to teach in remote places, relying on his phenomenal memory in the absence of books - gave his work its bracing mix of acute Englishness and expansive freedom from insularity. Apart from affording him fresh, arresting perspectives on his native culture (as when, to offer a tiny example, one of his Japanese students translated 'out of sight, out of mind' as 'invisible, insane'), his sojourns in the East put him in close contact with Buddhism. a faith which, though he never espoused it, he regularly used as a stick for beating Christianity.

The funniest of critics and the one least truckling to cramped conventions, he taught countless numbers of people like myself how to read and provided us with a dashing, eccentric example of passionate, and passionately comic, resistance to smug orthodoxy.

(Photograph omitted)