[1] Born Eileen Patricia Mulligan in New York City, Simpson’s mother died when she was a small child and she and her sister were placed in a Catholic orphanage.
Simpson remained an astute and sympathetic observer of Berryman, his poet and writer colleagues, and their wives and families, including Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and R.P.
[3] Between Berryman's alcoholism, infidelities, suicidal urges, and persistent self-destructive tendencies, Simpson was forced to conclude that "no amount of love and care could protect him from external circumstances, and that these could bring him to the edge of madness.
Still, as the Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley noted, it was a union characterized by "much happiness", and Simpson's enduring love and affection for Berryman, and the poets and poets' wives of their circle, are principal strengths of her memoir: a "cleareyed compassion... is characteristic of 'Poets in Their Youth,' which never sensationalizes these brilliant but wildly erratic young men, only seeks to understand them.
"[5] While New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, writing in the New York Review of Books on the occasion of its publication, called it "too forgiving by far",[7] Lee Siegel, reviewing its reissue in the New York Times, ascribes to the memoir "an almost uncanny clemency and a kind of cerulean objectivity", calling it "both a memorial to the men Simpson admired and an admonitory epitaph on lives lived at often false and ugly odds with their own aspirations toward truth and beauty.