SOURCE: A review of Ships Going into the Blue, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 3, Summer, 1995, p. 594.

In the following review, Pratt offers a mixed assessment of Ships Going into the Blue, finding the collection “uneven, sometimes whimsical, but often provocative.”

In an earlier book, The Character of the Poet, Louis Simpson contended that poetry suffers when poets lack character; in Ships Going into the Blue he contends that for art to be great, “it must proceed from a man or woman who is great.” So, against those who deplore the lack of readers for poetry, he soundly advises that “the way to overcome the present neglect of poetry is to write great poems.”

Such a demand will seem unreasonable to the egalitarians of today, who want poets and poetry to be as common as everything else; but they are, as Simpson says, either literary theorists who don't...