The simultaneous publication of these two books—People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983 and The Best Hour of the Night—offers the opportunity for both a retrospective view of the career of Louis Simpson and an assessment of his maturest and most characteristic work. People Live Here, which is based upon seven separate earlier volumes, makes clear that there are three major phases to be found in the body of Simpson's work, phases which are separated by major changes in style, subject matter, and approach.

The poems in Simpson's first three books—The Arrivestes (1949), Good News of Death (1955), and A Dream of Governors (1959)—are written in tight, traditional English lyric forms, forms that have the effect of dissociating the poet's sensibility from the very material he is attempting to write about. In many of these early efforts, Simpson sounds rather like the new metaphysical poets, who had their vogue in the 1940's and '50's. (p. 662)

It was after the publication of his third book that Simpson made the first major change in his work. To bring more of his own voice into his poetry, he abandoned traditional English forms and began to write in free verse…. Besides being more relaxed, the new style is more personal than the old, giving the reader a more direct impression of the sensibility that informs these poems. In fact, the feature which above all others gives unity to the poetry of Louis Simpson is his concern with the way this sensibility reacts to and interacts with the society that surrounds him.

We must not conclude from this, however, that Simpson is a confessional poet. Confessional poetry is personal because it takes for its subject matter the literal details of the poet's life and feelings, the truth of that life as lived in the real world; Simpson's poetry is personal because it emerges from and expresses a single, central, perceiving sensibility. Although the effect of this can be even more intimate than what the reader experiences in confessional poetry, it is achieved while the poet maintains a reticent posture with regard to the external details of his life. (p. 663)

At the same time that he was striving for a greater directness in his style, Simpson also effected a radical change in the subject matter of his poetry. Generally speaking, his early poems may be said to exist in the disembodied nowhere land of traditional lyric poetry. With the publication of his fourth volume, At the End of the Open Road (1963), Simpson turned emphatically to America for both his setting and his themes…. The sensibility which speaks and thinks in Simpson's poems is seriously alienated from America during the second phase of his work. America is seen as the country which not only had killed the Indians but was also participating, indefensibly, in an unjust war in Vietnam. The only recourse open to the sensitive individual was to retreat into a kind of protective isolation…. (pp. 663-64)

With the publication of Adventures of the Letter I (1971), Simpson's work began to develop away from the alienation expressed in phase two towards a stronger feeling of brotherly love….

Simpson is coming to empathize more directly with his fellow "footsoldiers" and their ordinary "human suffering." No longer will his protagonist feel so "cut off in his affections from the people around him"; he will not hold the citizenry at large responsible for such atrocities as the American participation in Vietnam—that rap will be pinned on those who earn it, the "officer class" generally. The most important change in Simpson's work at this point in his career, then, is the increased sense of empathy those poems express for other people. The change in attitude—and in method of operation—on the part of the Simpson protagonist is made clear in a poem like "The Mexican Woman," from Caviare at the Funeral [1981]. In the first section of this poem, the speaker is panhandled by an old man who claims to have been "in Mexico with Black Jack Pershing"…. (p. 664)

The second section tells the reaction of the speaker to this chance encounter; "the old man's tale still haunts me," he begins:

         I know what it's like to serve
         in Mexico with Black Jack Pershing….

Through the use of his imagination, the speaker is able to become the old man, to experience a portion of his life. The poem is curiously both objective and subjective; objective because of its interest in the life and concerns of a character other than the speaker, but subjective in that it is also the speaker's story, the story of his imagination.

In its use of a narrative structure and reliance on significant, telling details for action, character, and meaning, this poem resembles prose fiction. Simpson is the author of one novel, Riverside Drive, published in 1962, and recently has talked about writing another. In fact—if such things can be judged by what the protagonist of his poems says—it would appear that as a young man Simpson may have aspired more to writing fiction than poetry. (pp. 664-65)

And yet, despite this ambition, despite his skill at manipulating narrative, detail, and imagery, Simpson did not become a good novelist…. The failure occurs in the area of plot—the individual scenes of Riverside Drive are pointed and affecting, excellent at conveying mood, but never add up to a cohesive overall statement. In short, Simpson's fiction embodies all the qualities that would be needed if one wished to write a narrative kind of lyric poetry—which is precisely the choice he ultimately made. (pp. 665-66)

Narrative is used in Simpson's best poems, then, not to channel action towards an exciting climax but to organize images and relatively minor incidents towards some revelation of personality and feeling. Because this poetry is more or less static in terms of external action, imagery is of considerable importance in the achievement of its effects. Simpson, in fact, considers himself a kind of latter-day Imagist poet…. In Simpson's use of imagery there is something of the idea behind Eliot's objective correlative: if the image is properly prepared for and invested with appropriate suggestions, it should call up in the reader the same emotions it evokes in the author or in the created character.

Most often, the feelings that are expressed in the poems of phase three are again those of the Simpson protagonist, the sensibility that has always been at the heart of his work. However, because of the greater degree of empathy that informs this phase, we find as well poems spoken by characters who are obviously different from this one; also, there are poems written from the third-person point of view, in which Simpson imagines from the outside and sympathetically presents the feelings of another…. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Simpson's recent work is just how different the people he writes about are—not just from the sensibility that inhabits his work, but from the characters who appear in contemporary American poetry generally.

Most contemporary poets, of course, write primarily about their own personalities; Simpson is no exception to this rule. When we get beyond this level, what we commonly find are characters who are very much like the poets—sensitive, intelligent, well-educated, of refined taste in food, music, literature, what have you. When we go beyond the poet as character in the poems of Simpson's phase three, by contrast, what we find are the ordinary citizens of America—not college professors and orchestra conductors, not manual laborers and nuclear protesters, but middle-class burghers, people who shop in shopping centers rather than in boutiques, people who watch "Love Boat" rather than "Masterpiece Theatre," people who worry about their mortgages, their false teeth, their teen-age children when they don't come home on time. Simpson's goal is to write not about an unusual, privileged way of life, but about the life most people are living in this country today. (pp. 666-67)

"Quiet Desperation," which appears in The Best Hour of the Night [1983], is written from the third-person point of view and concerns a single day in the life of an unnamed citizen of suburbia. (p. 667)

"Quiet Desperation" establishes a common ground of ordinary human feelings where the guiding sensibility of Simpson's poems and his middle-class protagonist can meet to share what they have in common. There are many poems like this in this latest period, poems which express, on the part of that sensibility, an authentic degree of empathy for humankind generally. However, there are also many poems in this phase which express something that may seem contrary to this—the continuing recognition by the Simpson sensibility of a difference between himself and most other people. It is not the feelings themselves that make him different, nor their quality and depth; rather, it is the degree to which these feelings are speculated upon and understood. This realization does not lessen the empathy felt by the protagonist, but it does reinforce his sense of isolation, of an ultimate and irremediable aloneness. (p. 669)

The problem faced by the sensibility of Simpson's poems is that the society of which he is a part is so much more superficial in its interests than he is; it is committed to money, to the everyday problems of work, but ignores the depths of human emotion, the life of the soul….

The alienation of Simpson's protagonist results precisely from his devotion to the things which are unseen by the middle class generally: a full range of genuine emotions, the life of the soul. (p. 671)

[Crucial] differences between the Simpson protagonist and the average middle-class citizen remain; it is the expression of these differences that makes some readers think the poems are satirical. The tone of these poems is an extremely delicate one—in part due to the understatement and restraint that is built into their form. Simpson is attempting to balance very different opinions of two nearly identical things—his empathy for the people and his contempt for the values by which they sometimes live their lives. (p. 672)

At the end of The Best Hour of the Night, Simpson has placed an ars poetica devoted to the plight of the poet who chooses to live and work in suburbia. Entitled "The Unwritten Poem," it begins by asking where poetry is to be found; "Not in beautiful faces and distant scenery," he answers, but:

          In your life here, on this street
          where the houses from the outside
          are all alike, and so are the people.
          Inside, the furniture is dreadful—
          floc on the walls and huge color television.

However much he may dislike the details of this way of life, its tastelessness, the absence of emotion, the poet still must also love the people he writes about; as Pound said more than fifty years ago, a poetry which is simply satirical will inevitably corrode and die from the inside out. Simpson knows, however, that his feelings will never be reciprocated by the community: "To love and write unrequited / is the poet's fate." The poem ends with a vision of the soullessness of American life, as the poet watches the morning commuters "grasping briefcases" as they "pass beyond your gaze / and hurl themselves into the flames." They are like the dead souls of Eliot's "The Waste Land," seen crossing London Bridge every morning. Ultimately, it is the soullessness of American life that places the individual in Simpson's poems at odds with this society.

Though he has not often been recognized as such, Louis Simpson is certainly one of America's more original poets. Most of today's poets occupy a middle ground, writing with great sincerity about their own feelings, using the literary forms most in vogue. Originality is to be found in poets willing to question the received truths about their art. For some, this has led directly to an interest in the possibilities of craft, the possibilities of pure imagination; the personal self is abandoned in favor of a world of make-believe, where anything the author can imagine can happen. Simpson's direction is different, but no less original. While he too abandons the egotistical self, he plunges not into a world of make-believe but into a relentlessly realistic world, a world most poets think is hopelessly prosaic. Even more remarkable is the high quality of the work produced from these raw materials—these poems are readable and aesthetically attractive, engaging both the intellect and the emotions with their imagistic density. Although Louis Simpson has been publishing poems for nearly forty years, his best work has come in the last ten. The simultaneous appearance of these two handsome volumes will go a long way towards solidifying his position among the best poets of today. (pp. 674-75)

Peter Stitt, "Louis Simpson's Best Hour," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 662-75.