Empson, Piaget, and Child Logic in Wartime

Abstract The child psychologist Jean Piaget’s interviews with children in the 1920s formed the basis of his research into the development of logic and reasoning in the human mind. Empson’s defence of his own brand of metaphysical verse against the charge of escapism is well known. John Haffenden has shown, in the notes to the Complete Poems , the uses Empson makes of early Piaget to bolster his complex and witty disclaimer of escapism, in particular Piaget’s theory of autism and collective monologue in the chatter of children at play in his first important work, The Language and Thought of the Child (1926). The Leavisite brickbat that metaphysical modernist poetry iswilfully egocentric and obscure, withdrawn from the social world of moral realities, self-indulgently revelling in redundantly puzzling language games, is cleverly related to Piaget on primitive child logic because of Leavis’s turn against Empson after the Alice essay.