SOURCE: A review of The Character of the Poet, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 289–90.

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...