In the following essay, Schmidt analyzes White, finding elements that strongly liken the series to the tradition of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the following interview, Simic discusses influences on his work, his personal experiences in Eastern Europe and the United States, and the act of writing poetry.
SOURCE: “Joseph Cornell: Naked in Arcadia,” in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVIII, No. 44, December 21, 1992, pp. 130-34. In the following excerpted review, Hirsch praises Simic's musings on the artist Joseph Cornell in Dime-Store Alchemy.
In the following review, Cramer examines elements of Simic's poetry throughout his career that effectively distinguish him from other poets of his generation.
It is too simple (and simply wrong) to say that poets tailor their styles to gratify their critics. But critical demands, even if they do not force a poet to alter his style in a specified way, encourage him to change it in whatever way he will. An American myth of progress, a pioneer faith in Manifest Destiny, still shapes the preconceptions of many critics and poets in our literature. The absence of change, of visible movement, suggests failure. We expect each collection of poems to advance beyond its pre...
In the following review, Anderson explains how the poems in Hotel Insomniac and the prose observations in Dime-Store Alchemy compliment each other, noting in particular Simic's interest in the meaning and purpose of art.
In the following review, Funsten provides an overview of Selected Poems 1963-1983, finding that Simic's later work is neither as startling nor as evocative as his earlier poems.
[The most distinctive quality of Simic's poetry] (I hesitate to say straight out its strength) seems actually to be its most signal limitation. This is a brilliant fluency of invention that enables him to sustain a uniform texture through a whole poem and a whole collection of poems—Dismantling the Silence—without its ever offering much substance for the mind to feed on. One would call it a natural metaphysics, except that the word suggests the essentially knotty poetry of the English s...
Charles Simic's poetry … has often urged on us the importance of the pre-civilized, even the pre-human, portion of ourselves, in a voice ranging from the beguiling spookiness of Eastern European folk tale, in Dismantling the Silence, to an all too modishly American brand of earthiness ("I piss in the sink / with a feeling of / eternity") in parts of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk. Neither of these extremes is characteristic of Simic's grimmer, more diffident thir...
There is language and there are languages. Our obsession with translations from languages few of us can read with any cultural comprehension may be leading us away from the traditional connotative values of English into a Peter Pan world of raw and too often merely clever imagery. But for Charles Simic the encounter with a language and a poet alien to most of us has been decisive and healthy. From Vasco Popa, Simic has learned a tone and strategy unfamiliar to English and American poetry. Simic's bes...
Charles Simic co-edited with Mark Strand the excellent anthology, Another Republic (1976). He shares with Strand an unmitigated conviction that Armageddon is not far off. But whereas the American is seemingly prompted by future fears alone, Simic, a Yugoslav, born to gallows humour as the sparks fly upward, is hounded by the past—the past, one presumes, not simply of his Serbian childhood: the past of Europe, which he retells as a succession of mini-Grimm fairy tales at their most monstrous, peopled ...
In the following essay, Miller analyzes similarities between Simic's poem “Cabbage,” Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” and John Donne's “The Flea.”
Charles Simic is almost unique in American poetry. He was born in another country, into another language. His middle European, Yugoslavian origins still make him an immigrant, an outsider to formal and experiential assumptions that most American poets are not even aware they have. Not that Simic is not an American poet. In fact, Classic Ballroom Dances … is more in the American grain of [William Carlos] Williams than any recent collection one can call to mind. It is a question of sensibility. Simic&#...
[The poems in "Charon's Cosmology" show] that it is possible to write intensely personal poetry without openly placing oneself at the center. In certain poems, though, [Mr. Simic] allows us to believe that he is writing to us directly. In "Charon's Cosmology,"… Mr. Simic does not write in a face-to-face confrontation with his subject and yet the effect is [direct and immediate]…. His poems echo and re-echo in the mind, as of memories of lives, impulses...
The writer of parables must know what he's about, even if they're Zen or surrealist parables, for the reductive logic of plot will otherwise turn into false profundity. Charles Simic has written many surrealist parables, and ["Classic Ballroom Dances"] … shows him trapped in his own style. Those who admire his work (and he has many imitators) praise its bizarre and startling freshness. But the persistence throughout several books of this mythic, folk-flavored simplicity ca...
I do not think Charles Simic's [Classic Ballroom Dances] will add to his reputation—a by now firmly established reputation for poems in the surrealist style that has become the academic poetry of the last two decades. Simic's own voice sounded clearly through the babble of his imitators. It was haunted, wryly imaginative, darkly self-possessed. And the poems themselves (their sound and size eventually led one to think of a new sub-genre: A Simic Poem) were distinguished by their unnervi...
I have not yet decided whether Charles Simic is America's great living surrealist poet, a children's writer, a religious writer, or simple-minded. My decision in this matter is irrelevant actually because, whatever he is, his poetry is cryptic and fascinating…. [One of his poems called Poem] contains all the elements which I admire in Simic's work. He begins the poem with his father writing and when he says he "writes in his coffin" the poem has been transferred int...
Charles Simic's first book, What the Grass Says, has a kind of rock-bottomed simplicity, a simplicity that is spiritual enough to qualify, I think, as a unique clarity of heart. Most of Simic's poems are about looking at small, modest things and seeing the sense in which they are, indeed, compounded of the stuff of poetry…. The completeness of Simic's commitment to inwardness [evident, for example, in his poem Stone] strikes me as very impressive. Subjects seem chosen for unpromi...
