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...
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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...
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In the following review, originally published in 1980, Nepo commends Simpson's analysis of Imagism in Three on the Tower.
The little seed of the Imagist movement made a great tree with twigs an...
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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...
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In the following review, originally published in 1981, Makuck offers a positive assessment of Caviare at the Funeral.
Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé ...
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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...
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In the following review of A Company of Poets, People Live Here, and The Best Hour of the Night, Flint discusses Simpson's place among postwar American poets and examines the defining characte...
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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...
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In the following review, Irwin offers a positive assessment of People Live Here.
People Live Here, the unassuming title of Louis Simpson's Selected Poems, provides a major body of work whose ac...
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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...
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In the following essay, Stitt provides an overview of Simpson's poetic development, his American sensibility, his thematic preoccupation with ordinary American experience and social alienation,...
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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...
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In the following review, Mole offers a positive assessment of People Live Here.
It is getting harder and harder to write a poem. That is, I can start one well enough—but how to finish.” ...
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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...
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In the following essay, originally published in three separate sections in 1958, 1960, and 1976, respectively, Bly praises the power and sensitivity of Simpson's verse, particularly in dealing ...
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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...
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In the following review, McDowell offers a positive assessment of Simpson's Collected Poems and praises Simpson's contribution to American poetry.
Of the eight individual and two selecte...
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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...
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In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of In the Room We Share.
Louis Simpson has become one of the most prolific poets on the American scene. Only two years after his substantial...
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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...
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In the following review, Burt offers a negative assessment of Ships Going into the Blue.
Like the fifty-odd other books in the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series, Louis Simpson�...
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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...
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In the following review, Mason praises Simpson's war poems and his memoir, The King My Father's Wreck, but finds shortcomings in Ships Going into the Blue and Simpson's later poet...
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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...
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In the following excerpt, Gwynn offers a positive assessment of Ships Going into the Blue.
What happens when poets turn their hands to prose? We might expect that they would have an easy go of it, wou...
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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 �...
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Critical Essay by T. R. Hummer
In a recent Georgia Review [see excerpt above], Peter Stitt writes that Louis Simpson's People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983 "makes clear that...
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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...
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Critical Essay by G. E. Murray
At a minimum, incisive poets may serve [their] era by suggesting some levels of personal good sense relative to certain senseless, impersonal realities. Further to the p...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Peter Bland
Louis Simpson once wrote that 'The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.' It doesn't any more. It goes to a suburban cul-de-sac where:
...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Alan Williamson
Over the years, one has often been tempted to ask, "Will the real Louis Simpson please stand up?" For there have been several. There was the correct but...
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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....
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Critical Essay by Robert Mcdowell
Many years ago in my reading I was shopping for a good contemporary lyric poet. I had trouble finding what I was looking for until a friend recommended the poems of L...
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Louis Aston Marantz Simpson
