The Complete Poems of William Empson
edited by John Haffenden
Allen Lane, £30, 512pp
Buy it at BOL

William Empson was one of the more influential, if puzzling, figures in 20th-century literature. Praised (and published) by TS Eliot, he was, at least for a while, an idol of FR Leavis and the Movement poets. His seminal volume of criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was published in 1930, when he was only 24.

A year earlier he had gained a first with special distinction in part one of the English Tripos at Cambridge (having, unusually, been permitted to switch from his highly successful mathematical studies), and been awarded a bye-fellowship. He was not able to take this up, however; he was "sent down" a month later, when a college porter discovered contraceptives among his possessions. Magdalene College had expelled one of the greatest talents of a generation.

Empson's criticism - founded on exhaustive close reading, an alertness to allusion and a desire to squeeze all possible meanings from his chosen texts - fed into the New Criticism advocated by his friend and tutor, IA Richards. Although the idea that one might read texts attentively and analytically is out of favour in some English departments these days, it was for several decades an orthodoxy. Even as a student, Empson had stressed his desire to bring to criticism "all possible attitudes, to turn upon a given situation every tool, however irrelevant or disconnected, of the contemporary mind". This attempt to synthesise, or at least aggregate, the various disciplines of contemporary thought can also be found in his poetry.

The critic whose Cambridge career was cut short by condoms went on to a brilliant academic career in Japan, China, and England. But the poet - whose early work was admired by Wittgenstein and the Bloomsbury group and seemed to occupy a space between TS Eliot's trail-blazing modernism and the political poetry of the Auden-MacNeice gang - did not write very much after the war; although he did not die until 1984, the poetry had basically finished by 1949. Empson's poetic output occupies about 100 pages. John Haffenden's excellent edition of the Complete Poems weighs in at around 500 pages, and the apparatus is not wasteful; indeed, it goes some way towards explaining why Empson stopped writing.

One of the most interesting things about this volume is the discovery that Empson's cerebral-looking pieces sprang from quite heartfelt emotions; he describes many of his earliest poems as "boy afraid of girl", and indeed they resemble Donne's work in their apparently incongruous accumulation of analogy and argument to deal with human relationship. Another shock is that some of the more famous and best-loved poems were not rated highly by Empson himself. It is odd to find him surprised by the success of, say, "Let it Go", a short and brilliant piece that one can quote in full:

"It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.

The more things happen to you, the more you can't

tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.

The talk would talk and go so far aslant.

You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there."

I had always taken this piece, by far his most direct, as a comment on the impossibility of encompassing everything at once: flooded by information, layered with analysis and the analysis of analysis ("the talk would talk"), one would go mad in the attempt. Martin Amis's Success intelligently alludes to the poem in a remark addressed to a schizophrenic; schizophrenia is in some ways about the breaking-down of our filtering mechanisms, being overwhelmed by sensory data. But Empson's comments on this "hopelessly bad" poem consistently assert that it is about "stopping writing". Perhaps, despite his brilliance as a critic, he was not the best interpreter or judge of his own work.

His poetry, it has to be said, is unusually difficult at first approach. It is densely allusive, not merely to other poetry but to the scientific knowledge of various periods and cultures. The syntax and the grammar are quirky, often condensed, frequently deliberately ambiguous. Yet Empson, for all his delight in the various readings and meanings he found in his critical work, did not want to mystify readers; he provided notes, explaining the odd facts or incidents that furnished him with his metaphors.

There is something oddly comical about these commentaries; they are frequently as oddly or elliptically phrased as the poetry they supposedly illuminate. Taken with the other comments Haffenden has collected, they give the unmistakable impression of a man baffled by his failure to communicate what he meant, despite his zeal in finding so many fertile meanings in other writers' poems.

Even today there is an unease about poems that come with their own notes. Eliot did it with The Waste Land, of course, though he suggested later (whether truthfully or not) that he had had to supply the bogus scholarship simply to bulk the poem out to book-length. Empson remarked as early as 1929 that the absence of common knowledge meant that "poets... have either got to be easier, or write their own notes... some may be pedantic, and some impertinent, but... it really ought to be possible".

Whether or not one feels the poems fail on this basis, the notes are sometimes essential. As Haffenden says of a line in "Advice", "we have to rely on WE's note to communicate to us (as the poem fails to do) that these terms refer to the course of syphilis infection". He then gently suggests that Empson hadn't correctly understood the symptoms of tertiary syphilis anyway.

For the most part, though, the notes are engaging, good-humoured and helpful; and they stem less from snobbery than from a recognition that it is not reasonable to expect your readers to have covered exactly the same ground as you. And at their most successful, the poems have the potent excitement of the Metaphysical writers; a ferocious intellectual curiosity combined with emotional and political engagement.

Empson's "musical line" is one reason these pieces work on us immediately and encourage our attention. His use of the villanelle and variants thereof, or terza rima, or forms recalling poets as diverse as Swinburne or Marvell, is impressive. The villanelle-style poems are the most memorable, partly because repeated lines and refrains stick in the mind, but mainly because he comes up with such resonant lines - "Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills"; "It is the pain, it is the pain endures"; "I have mislaid the torment and the fear. / Those that doubt drugs, let them doubt which was here".

Charmingly, he uses Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for the line "A girl can't go on laughing all the time". Loos, we gather from this volume, was flattered, but said she couldn't study the poem too hard because it might turn her into "a weeper".

Haffenden describes Empson at one point as "avid for annotation. He was positively insistent upon its being done, and done properly". By those standards, Haffenden has done Empson proud; he offers an entertaining biographical introduction, discusses the texts and Empson's views on notes, gives us a timeline and scrupulously traces the allusions and references in the poems that Empson did not spell out himself. Given Empson's wide and eclectic reading, this is a formidable labour of scholarship; but rather than reducing the poet to unrevivable dryness, Haffenden brings him to life, showing us his personality, his foibles, his endearing modesties and concerns. He deserves every congratulation.