Despite the complexity of Empson's critical methods and attitude, his work, in particular "Seven Types of Ambiguity", had a significant impact on the New Criticism, a school of criticism that directed particular attention to close reading of texts, among whose adherents may be numbered F. R. Leavis (whose critical approach was, however, already well developed before Empson appeared on the scene – he had been teaching at Cambridge since 1925), although Empson could scarcely be described as an adherent or exponent of such a school or, indeed, of any critical school at all. Indeed, Empson consistently ridiculed, both outrightly in words and implicitly in practice, the doctrine of the intentional fallacy formulated by William K. Wimsatt, an influential New Critic. Indeed, Empson's distaste for New Criticism could manifest itself in a distinctively dismissive and brusque wit, as when he described New Criticism (which he ironically labelled "the new rigour") as a "campaign to make poetry as dull as possible" ("Essays on Renaissance Literature", Volume 1: "Donne and the New Philosophy", p. 122). Similarly, both the title and the content of one of Empson's volumes of critical papers, "Using Biography", show a patent and polemical disregard for the teachings of New Critics as much as for those of Roland Barthes and postmodern literary theories predicated upon, if not merely influenced by, the notion of the Death of the Author, despite the fact that some scholars regard Empson as a progenitor of certain of these currents of criticism, which vexed Empson. As Frank Kermode stated: