[In the following excerpt, Gwynn offers a positive assessment of Ships Going into the Blue.]

What happens when poets turn their hands to prose? We might expect that they would have an easy go of it, wouldn't we? Prose, after all, is easier to forge than poetry. Prose writers are spared having to learn phrases like medial caesura or substitute foot: all that each of them has to know is how to put a semicolon in its place and make subjects and verbs agree. Poets, on the other hand, go mad worrying about such silly matters as when to end their lines; now that everyone uses a computer, prose writers have even that minimal decision made automatically for them, courtesy of Bill Gates. Any hack can write a sentence like “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens,” but it takes a true genius, a poet, to break it into eight lines that have kept English majors bemused for the better part of a century. Yes, when poets shed all that nasty baggage of rhyme, meter, and terminology they have been forced to lug across the Landscape from Hell (“All out for Onomatopoeia. Next stop Synecdoche”) you'd expect them to soar. For the most part they do, though some soar distinctly higher than others.

The works of critical prose under review here, which represent several years’ accumulation, range widely from the lordly (or ladily, in this case) work of scholarship to the more informal collections of reviews, occasional pieces, and the interview, that mainstay of the contemporary poet's repertoire. No works of fiction by poets have crossed my desk recently, though at least three of the authors discussed here have produced widely admired specimens; but much that lies in the autobiographies and memoirs that I can mention only briefly here might pass for such (and, yes, the pun was intended). One of the poet-critics under discussion has even produced a genuine best-seller, a spirited apologia for homosexuality that takes a tack different from the shrill invective of the gay-rights activists.

One of the monuments of this century's literature is the distinguished body of criticism by American poets. I recently edited an anthology of American poet-critics born between 1888 and 1916, and I was consistently taken with the quality of the writing, beginning with Pound, Eliot, and Ransom and ending with Jarrell, Hayden, and Ciardi; they look even better when their prose is compared with the unreadable mumbling that passes for much contemporary academic criticism. We may have no poet-critics of comparable stature today, but there are many doing distinguished work, most of them as practical critics, a class largely overlooked in this age of theory. …

The other five volumes in hand are slimmer than [Daniel] Hoffman's but still provide many treasures for the browser. [Donald] Hall and Louis Simpson have been the [University of Michigan's Poets on Poets] series’ most frequent contributors; their books represent their fourth and third volumes, respectively, and, indeed, the published prose of both writers—novels, memoirs, sports and personal essays—has been eclectic and prolific, outweighing their considerable production of poetry by a good measure. Simpson's Ships Going into the Blue, which follows his Collected Prose, contains short reviews, talks, and essays which, like most of Simpson's criticism, have a strong personal flavor that can quickly turn from frank to crank. In the more mellow vein I enjoyed “A Leave of Absence,” an account of a year's sabbatical in England. A side trip to Ireland yields a good Heaney story: “Seamus was driving, … he pulled over and stopped. ‘It's my father,’ he said. On the far side of a field a man was leaving a pub. Seamus went over and talked to him. He returned to the car. ‘I haven't seen him in months.’” The trip has its darker moments. In a Protestant enclave Simpson stops reading before an unresponsive audience and instead questions them about the political situation: “When I discussed the shooting of Catholics by the British army on the day that had been named ‘Black Sunday,’ a man in the audience corrected me. ‘We don't call it that,’ he said, “we call it ‘Good Sunday.’” “Theater Business” provides an account of how the poet ran a Poetry Center at his university. Those who have sponsored university readings will sympathize with Simpson's accounts of his anxiety attacks. I did. For years I worried that the poet would not arrive in time for the reading; after a few stinkers I began to worry that he or she would.

“On the Neglect of Poetry in the United States” reveals Simpson's inner Grinch: “Universities offer courses and degrees in creative writing because they are profitable … to the university. Many people would like to be writers and will pay good money to be told that they are. A teacher of creative writing is expected to encourage students—a very different thing from giving honest criticism. … A remark by Edward Gibbon should be placed above the entrance to every writing program in the United States: “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.’” I wonder if Simpson would recommend that the same slogan adorn medical schools as well. Simpson has also recently produced The King My Father's Wreck, a collection of autobiographical essays stretching from his Jamaican boyhood to the death of his formidable mother a few years ago at nearly a hundred years of age. He has mined much of the material here before—in poems, a novel, and an autobiography; but Simpson's life, which embraces scenes as various as the Battle of the Bulge and Berkeley during the free-speech movement, has been fuller than that of most poets and thus seems virtually inexhaustible as a source of fascinating reminiscences.