Louis Simpson Summary

American poet, critic, and educator Louis Aston Marantz Simpson (born 1923) was widely recognized for the elegance of his verse.Louis Simpson was born on March 27, 1923, in Kingston, Jamaica, in the B... Read more

In the following review, originally published in 1964, Locke addresses Simpson's change of style and focus in At the End of the Open Road. So much of modern art is concerned with the reaction o... Read more

In the following interview, originally conducted in 1980, Simpson discusses his formative influences, his approach to writing poetry, his artistic aims and thematic concern with ordinary experience, a... Read more

In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Lazer examines Simpson's assimilation of Whitman's poetic themes, style, and voice, and Simpson's subsequent effort to come t... Read more

In the following excerpt, Lucas offers a positive assessment of People Live Here. The Second World War was in a sense America's first. How would their soldier-poets write about it? Randall Jarr... Read more

In the following excerpt, Breslin offers a positive assessment of The Best Hour of the Night. The various experiments in making poetry more like prose over the last thirty years or so have often invol... Read more

In the following review, Ringold offers a positive assessment of The Best Hour of the Night. A lyrical writer of power and delicacy, Louis Simpson shines once again in The Best Hour of the Night. Simp... Read more

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,” Loui... Read more

In the following excerpt, Wakoski addresses Simpson's detached intelligence and effort to embrace common American experience, as reflected in Collected Poems. The Modernists took on the twentie... Read more

In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of Simpson's Selected Prose. Louis Simpson's Selected Prose is a companion volume to his recent Collected Poems (1988). Althou... Read more

In the following excerpt, Mackinnon offers an unfavorable assessment of In the Room We Share. Louis Simpson's new book [In the Room We Share] contains forty-nine poems and a prose journal about... Read more

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, Th... Read more

In the following review, Beaver discusses the evolution of Simpson's distinct poetic voice and aesthetic approach—as evident in Collected Poems and Selected Prose—and offers a fav... Read more

Critical Essay by Dave Smith In 1967, M. L. Rosenthal, in The New Poets, described a number of poets he found to have some tenuous connection with Robert Bly's The Sixties and said of them �... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Stitt The astonishing thing about Caviare at the Funeral is its radical presentation of American life. It has long seemed to me that Louis Simpson is among the most American of... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert B. Shaw Louis Simpson's poems in Caviare at the Funeral are typically narrative; they are also typically brief, none going beyond a few pages. The poet hasn't ma... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Stitt The simultaneous publication of these two books—People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983 and The Best Hour of the Night—offers the opportunity for ... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Tillinghast Having been from the beginning an admirably "impure" poet (to borrow Czeslaw Milosz's sly term for Whitman, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, et al.... Read more