Introduction & Overview of In the Suburbs by Louis Simpson

In the Suburbs Introduction

"In the Suburbs" can be considered a representative poem of Louis Simpson's, both in subject matter and style. Following in the footsteps of his literary idol, Anton Chekhov, Simpson has fashioned a career of chronicling the mundane lives of ordinary people. However, his descriptions of middle- class life are not without thorns. Undergirding his poems about suburbia and small talk lurks a pervasive sense of gloom and despair. The very collection in which the poem appears, At the End of the Open Road, published in 1963 by Wesleyan University Press, is itself an extended and complicated evaluation of American society in the middle of the twentieth century. The title is a response to Walt Whitman's vision of America as a place of endless possibility, described in his poem "Song of the Open Road." Simpson considers the country a hundred years after Whitman wrote, when its geographical, and by implication spiritual,...
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