Poems 1935

Abstract Despite winning an early reputation with the handful of poems that were included in Cambridge Poetry 1929, Empson had to wait a further six years before his publishers brought out a volume of his poetry. Coincidentally, in the very summer of 1929 when he at once gained his degree and lost his fellowship, he had written from Magdalene College to offer a collection of ‘about twenty poems’ for consideration by his friend Ian Parsons, who had recently joined the publishing house of Chatto & Windus. Parsons felt hesitant about the poems—’it is rather difficult to make a decision on so little work’1—but asked to see them in any case; he received the packet on 14 June, along with this modest and beguiling message: