A Company of Poets: Poets On Poetry

This is a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews in which the author, himself a distinguished poet, expresses his ideas about the nature of poetry and criticizes his contemporaries. Simpson takes his stand with the “poetry of feeling” and agrees with Woodsworth that poetry should be written in a selection of the language “really spoken by men.” His reviews of American poets who have since become famous show Simpson to be an acute an innovative thinker. There are also essays on modern classics: Apollinaire, MacDiarmid, Lawrence, Crane, and Pound. The collection shows the full range of the critic of whom the Times Literary Supplement recently said: “Simpson’s critical and narrative voice is very distinctive – it is generous, sympathetic, spontaneously free and wittily fatalistic. Most originally, perhaps, this voice marries criticism, biography, literary and cultural history in an imaginative atmosphere of sheer wonder and discovery.”