SOURCE: “Innocence and Experience,” in New Statesman, June 22, 1984, pp. 23–24.

In the following excerpt, Lucas offers a positive assessment of People Live Here.

The Second World War was in a sense America's first. How would their soldier-poets write about it? Randall Jarrell, who didn't go to the war but who had read Owen and Sassoon, took an expected route. The waste of war, the pity of war: these themes produced such classics as ‘Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner,’ ‘Eighth Air-Force’ and ‘Pilots Man Your Planes.’ For Louis Simpson it was very different. He fought across Europe, from Normandy to Germany. ‘During the war I felt there was an intelligence watching and listening,’ he says in an endnote to this selection of his poems. It is not a remark that you could imagine coming from Owen, or from Jarrell, and it goes much of the way towards explaining why Simpson's...