[In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of Simpson's Selected Prose.]

Louis Simpson's Selected Prose is a companion volume to his recent Collected Poems (1988). Although he has long been established as an important American poet of his generation, born in the same year (1923) as James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, and several others, he came to the States from a somewhat exotic milieu in Jamaica. His father was a lawyer of Scottish descent; his mother was born in Russia. He immediately sets these facts before the reader in his foreword to the new volume, a miscellany of letters, memoirs, journal entries, and literary essays and reviews, which compose a sort of enveloping action for his poems. Since he has increasingly brought the autobiographical element into his verse, the prose pieces, fragmentary though some of them are, prove useful in assessing Simpson's qualities as a poet. The language of his prose always resembles the language of his poems—what one might call the middle style—and indeed he sometimes prints random prose excerpts that he has turned into poems.

Simpson represents the voice of common sense; he is suspicious of much contemporary critical theory, just as he is contemptuous of such terms as counterproductive, vulnerable, and the cutting edge that turn up much too frequently in contemporary discourse. His attitude concerning language often resembles George Orwell's. It is thus rather interesting to find him disappointed with a writer like Trollope, who represents “common sense” for many readers. In the end his great writers are visionaries, and perhaps his finest critical performance is an essay on poetic theory in Wordsworth and Proust. Here he traces a fascinating connection between The Prelude and A la recherche by way of Ruskin, whom at one point Proust translated into French. This essay gives Simpson the occasion to make a defense of poetry that is truly eloquent.