Critical Essay | Critical Review by Mark Nepo

Critical Review by Mark Nepo

SOURCE: “Poetry and Its Genesis in the Twentieth Century,” in On Louis Simpson: Depths Beyond Happiness, edited by Hank Lazer, University of Michigan Press, 1988, pp. 112–16.

In the following review, originally published in 1980, Nepo commends Simpson's analysis of Imagism in Three on the Tower.

The little seed of the Imagist movement made a great tree with twigs and leaves spreading over the world.

—Three on the Tower

Simpson seems to view literary history as a chemist's funnel with a long plastic stem. The point at which the funnel fans out marks the beginning of the twentieth century. The rising legacy of that stem till 1912 is characterized as a narrow and tidy corridor from Classicism to Romanticism, which he earmarks with Rousseau. Simpson's definition of literature is implicit and nondissectible from his real interest; namely, the history and flux of ideas and how it shapes the men's lives...
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