Books, Arts & Manners: Cross with God

Poets in Their YouthBy Eileen Simpson

Random House, 272 pp., $15.50 “Gossip is charming,” said Oscar Wilde. “All history is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.” By this severe standard, Poets in Their Youth is faultlessly historical; there is not a breath of moralizing in it. We are kept at an amused, measured distance from Eileen Simpson, the author, catching her eyelashes in her modish veil during a meeting with her poet-lover, John Berryman, in the early 1940s. We are kept just as far from poet Delmore Schwartz, clawing at his heart for an hour as he dies in the hallway of a cheap Times Square hotel in 1966.

JR

About the Author

James M. Rawley

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Poetry

Poets in Their YouthBy Eileen Simpson

Random House, 272 pp., $15.50 “Gossip is charming,” said Oscar Wilde. “All history is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.” By this severe standard, Poets in Their Youth is faultlessly historical; there is not a breath of moralizing in it. We are kept at an amused, measured distance from Eileen Simpson, the author, catching her eyelashes in her modish veil during a meeting with her poet-lover, John Berryman, in the early 1940s. We are kept just as far from poet Delmore Schwartz, clawing at his heart for an hour as he dies in the hallway of a cheap Times Square hotel in 1966.