[In the following review, Pratt offers a positive assessment of The Character of the Poet.]

“I was born in Jamaica in the British West Indies of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father,” Louis Simpson writes [in The Character of the Poet], and from such a mixture of race and place he has made himself into an American poet—both an immigrant and an expatriate poet, since he tells us his first book of poems was published in Paris at his own expense, during a year when he was studying French to see if he could be influenced by French poetry. Apparently the experiment was successful, because he quotes a poem that he wrote about an American tourist in Paris; however, the point of the poem, as of many of the essays in the volume, is that contemporary poets are footloose cosmopolitans whose work lacks the substantiality of theme that made strongly rooted poets such as Wordsworth and Hardy and Frost great. “The slightest poem of Hardy's vibrates with the life that was in him,” says Simpson, and he argues that it is just this sturdy and humane character of the poet which is lacking in most of the verse being written today.

The diagnosis sounds sensible; what, then, is the remedy? Certainly it is not to be found in the fashionable confessional poets, who only demonstrate that “American poetry has been going round and round the self like a squirrel in a cage.” There must be something beyond the self important enough for the poet to express: “In order to write poetry one must believe in something,” but the question is, what? Simpson acknowledges that few poets still believe in divine inspiration, as classical poets did, or in a spiritual affinity with nature, which was the source of inspiration for romantic poets. Furthermore, “Poets are free men and women—they cannot serve an ideology,” and so all that is left as a source of genuine poetry in the present is “the community.” Because “only a small percentage of the U.S. population reads” (he estimates that the American audience for poetry is two or three thousand out of over two hundred million people) and because these readers do not form the sort of “limited, but very powerful, influential audience” that poets like Shakespeare and Wordsworth wrote for, it is not really a community the poet must write for but widely scattered individuals, many of whom are writers themselves. Simpson says, half jokingly, that what he seeks is “a kind of folk art for American intellectuals,” the kind of poetry which is best represented, in his view, by the work of William Carlos Williams.

Simpson's two essays on Williams are at the heart of the volume, for Simpson makes the high claim that “of all American poets who have written in this century he is the most influential.” He credits Williams with having shown “that poetry can exist in our own lives” by making poems out of everyday things, by writing in a rhythm as natural as speech, and by giving the effects of spontaneity and honesty to all that he wrote. Thus Williams succeeded in embodying the character of the American nation in his poetry, and although his audience remained small, because “in the United States poets have always been regarded as extraneous,” he nevertheless transformed the common life of his time into art. No doubt there is a peculiarly American strength of character reflected in Williams's verse, and though it is not as wholly original as Simpson makes it out to be, owing much to other American poets such as Whitman and Pound, his example does lend credence to Simpson's generally sound and commonsense reflections on the relatively diminished state of American poetry in the late twentieth century.