Louis Simpson

Jamaican American poet, author, scholar, and critic

• Born: March 27, 1923
• Birthplace: Kingston, Jamaica
• Died: September 14, 2012

Biography

Louis Aston Marantz Simpson was born in Jamaica to lawyer Aston Simpson and Russian immigrant and aspiring actor Rosalind Marantz. While visiting New York as a teenager to visit his maternal grandmother, he learned for the first time that his mother was Jewish, which meant that, according to Jewish law, he was too. He would not learn until much later that his paternal grandmother was black. His parents divorced soon after, and his father remarried.

Simpson’s father died when he was sixteen. A year later, he immigrated to New York to attend Columbia University. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he served for a time in the 101st Airborne Division. After the war ended, he returned to Columbia to complete his studies, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1948 and his master's degree two years later. After working in publishing for a time, he returned to Columbia as a teacher and earned his doctorate in 1959. His subsequent academic career led him first to the University of California, Berkeley and then to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught from 1967 until his retirement in 1993.

Simpson was married and then divorced three times. He had three children from his first two marriages: a daughter, Anne, and two sons, Matthew and Anthony. He died at his home on Long Island on September 14, 2012, seven years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Simpson’s early poems were metrical and rhymed. As he matured, his style underwent two major changes: first, in At the End of the Open Road (1963), which won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he broke away from elegant metrics into hard-edged, imagistic free verse; then, in Searching for the Ox (1976), he began to delve into narrative, with spare lines stripped of most artifice. Yet his interest in storytelling was there from the beginning, in poems such as “Carentan O Carentan,” which recounts a bloody ambush in ironic ballad stanzas, contrasting the pastoral beauty of a “shady lane” with the “watchers in their leopard suits” who “aimed between the belt and boot / And let the barrel climb.”

One of the sections of Simpson’s second volume of selected poems, People Live Here (1983), is titled “The Fighting in Europe.” In one of the poems in this section, “The Battle,” the speaker recalls most vividly “how hands looked thin / Around a cigarette, and the bright ember / Would pulse with all the life there was within.” These lines suggest that even though Simpson’s manner changed dramatically, he remained interested in the telling detail (the ember) and the life within people. The other sections of People Live Here show the range of Simpson’s thematic interests: “Songs and Lyrics,” “The Discovery of America,” “Modern Lives,” and “Tales of Volhynia” (poems about Russia, where his mother had been born). Some of Simpson’s lyric poems, such as “Birch” and “As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs,” are sonorous and neatly articulated, while others tell stories in their musical forms. In “My Father in the Night Commanding No,” for example, he uses rhymed quatrains to recount life with his practical father and romantic mother.

Many of Simpson’s poems deal with American life, both his own immigrant discovery and astonishment (as in “The Pawnshop”) and his close observation of neighbors in the suburbs. In “The Tenant,” Simpson mentions a kind of investigation similar, perhaps, to his own practice: “Behind the Perry Masons and Agatha Christies / I came across a packet of letters. / It was like being a detective.” Behind the commonplace mysteries lie the greater mysteries of the commonplace.

Simpson was constantly peering into other lives and examining his own mind, still trying to figure out America. An outsider in a constantly strange land, he remained an insider, from early childhood, within the world of books. Perhaps his great facility with the poetic tradition allowed him to give up prosodic virtuosity in the pursuit of the pure, bare story, transformed into poetry because it was not embellished but cut into no-nonsense lines.

Simpson was, at heart, a visionary poet, much of whose power came from the plainspokenness of his narrative probings. His vision owes much to two writers in particular, Walt Whitman and Anton Chekhov, and the two great changes in his work correspond to his close reading of these masters. Several poems in At the End of the Open Road, Simpson’s first breakthrough, pay homage to Whitman and speak to him. Toward the end of “Lines Written near San Francisco,” Simpson concludes, “Whitman was wrong about the People, / But right about himself. The land is within. / At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.” His own vision of America was dark and foreboding, as in “The Inner Part,” about the country emerging from World War II: “Priests, examining the entrails of birds, / Found the heart misplaced, and seeds / As black as death, emitting a strange odor.”

His second breakthrough began with Searching for the Ox and was confirmed by Caviare at the Funeral (1980), whose title poem is based on a story by Chekhov. A later poem, “Another Boring Story,” begins with a Chekhov story about one professor and then adds a story about another, apparently drawn from Simpson’s own experiences of university life. The similarity, like a good metaphor, is rooted in contrast, the distance between the two parts.

Simpson’s vision was based in irony, in the sense of a discrepancy between how things were and how they now are, between dreams and lives, between beauty and ugliness, between clamor and quiet. In “Ed,” for example, a drunken man whose family, years ago, disapproved of his former girlfriend, a cocktail waitress, wishes that he had married her instead of the “respectable woman” who eventually left him: “‘Well,’ they said, ‘why didn’t you?’”

Author Works

Poetry:

The Arrivistes: Poems, 1940–1949, 1949

Good News of Death, and Other Poems, 1955

A Dream of Governors, 1959

At the End of the Open Road, 1963

Selected Poems, 1965

Adventures of the Letter I, 1971

Searching for the Ox, 1976

Caviare at the Funeral, 1980

The Best Hour of the Night, 1983

People Live Here: Selected Poems, 1949–1983, 1983

Collected Poems, 1988

In the Room We Share, 1990

Jamaica Poems, 1993

There You Are, 1995

The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940–2001, 2003

Struggling Times, 2009

Long Fiction:

Riverside Drive, 1962.

Nonfiction:

James Hogg: A Critical Study, 1962

North of Jamaica, 1972 (pb. in London as Air with Armed Men, 1972)

Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, 1975

A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell, 1978

A Company of Poets, 1981

The Character of the Poet, 1986

Ships Going into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry, 1994

The King My Father’s Wreck, 1995 (autobiography)

Edited Texts:

The New Poets of England and America, 1957 (with Donald Hall and Robert Pack)

An Introduction to Poetry, 1967

Translations:

Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology, 1997

“The Legacy” and “The Testament,” 2000 (of François Villon)

Miscellaneous:

Selected Prose, 1989

Bibliography

Lazer, Hank. “Louis Simpson and Walt Whitman: Destroying the Teacher.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1.3 (1983): 1–21. Web. 13 Apr. 2016. Lazer believes that Simpson’s poetic development since 1963 has been shaped by Simpson’s “dialogue” with Whitman.

Lazer, Hank, ed. On Louis Simpson: Depths beyond Happiness. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1988. Simpson himself said that one “should definitely have” this book. Lazer’s introduction surveys the criticism of Simpson’s work. The book itself offers shorter reviews and longer essays.

“Louis Simpson.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2016. Offers a brief biography of Simpson, along with a bibliography and recommendations for further reading.

Mason, David. “Louis Simpson’s Singular Charm.” Hudson Review Autumn 1995: 499–507. Mason examines Simpson’s literary theories and ideas as they are revealed in his poetry, criticism, and memoirs, particularly his latest publications.

Moran, Ronald. Louis Simpson. New York: Twayne, 1972. A book-length study of Simpson’s literary career. Opens with a brief biography and then examines the first five collections of poems and Simpson’s novel Riverside Drive. Moran discusses critical response to each of the publications and places many of the poems in the larger context of Simpson’s thought, emphasizing the development of the “emotive imagination” in his poetry.

Roberson, William H. Louis Simpson, a Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1980. Hank Lazer describes this work as “an invaluable book for anyone interested in Louis Simpson’s writing and in critical reactions to that body of writing.” Begins with a survey of Simpson’s poetic career and critical reputation. Part 1 lists writings by Simpson, and part 2 lists writings about him.

Rothstein, Mervyn. “Louis Simpson, Poet of Everyday Life, Dies at 89.” New York Times. New York Times, 17 Sept. 2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2016. Simpson’s obituary.

Simpson, Louis. Interview by Ronald Moran. Five Points Fall 1996: 45–63. Moran’s questions lead Simpson through a wide range of subjects, including his views on other poets, such as Sylvia Plath, themes in his own poetry, some favorites of his own poems, and contemporary poetry.

Stitt, Peter. “Louis Simpson: In Search of the American Self.” The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. 109–39. Stitt follows Simpson’s development through “three distinct phases” and traces the unifying sensibility in the poetry, looking closely at a number of the poems along the way. One of the longer essays on Simpson, this is one of the most illuminating as well.