SOURCE: “Stalking the Barbaric Yawp,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 804–15.

In the following excerpt, Wakoski addresses Simpson's detached intelligence and effort to embrace common American experience, as reflected in Collected Poems.

The Modernists took on the twentieth century with bravery and gusto and (in Stevens’ word) nobility. … The source of their brave nobility was … the conviction shared by the Imagists and Symbolistes alike that their technical mastery of the medium would summon and demonstrate a power of imagination adequate to the task of wringing order out of the confusion around them. …

The Postmodernists of the second half of this century … have been unable and unwilling to make such empowering claims for the imagination despite ever graver threats of nuclear war and institutionalized oppression and psychological instability. But it seems to me too easy to conclude censoriously that the Modernists’ failure to save the world from...