Louis Simpson

Louis Aston Marantz Simpson (born March 27, 1923 in Jamaica) is an American poet. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At The End Of The Open Road.

Life

His father was a lawyer of Scottish descent, and his mother Russian. At 17 he emigrated to the United States and began attending Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945 he was a member of the 101st Airborne Division and would fight in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Louis was a runner for the company captain, which involved transporting orders from company headquarters to officers on the front line. His company was involved in a very bloody battle with German forces on the west bank of what is now the Carentan France Marina. Simpson wrote "Carentan", a poem about the experience where US troops were ambushed. In the Netherlands, he was involved in Market Garden and Opheusden fighting. At Veghel, his company suffered 21 killed in a brutal shelling while in the local church yard. At Bastogne, he endured bitter cold temperatures while the 101st Division was surrounded by enemy forces for days. After the end of the war he attended the University of Paris.

His first book was The Arrivistes, published in 1949. It was hailed for its strong formal verse, but Simpson later moved away from the style of his early successes and embraced a spare brand of free verse. Though born in Jamaica, Simpson moved to the United States when he was seventeen to study at Columbia University. After his time in the army, and a brief period in France, Simpson worked as an editor in New York before completing his PhD at Columbia. He has taught at universities such as Columbia, the University of California-Berkeley, and SUNY-Stony Brook. Simpson’s life-long expatriate status has influenced his poetry, and he often uses the lives of ordinary Americans in order to critically investigate the myths the country tells itself. Though he occasionally revisits the West Indies of his childhood, he always keeps one foot in his adopted country. The outsider's perspective allows him to confront "the terror and beauty of life with a wry sense of humor and a mysterious sense of fate," wrote Edward Hirsch of the Washington Post. Elsewhere Hirsch described Simpson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, At the End of the Open Road, as "a sustained meditation on the American character," noting, "The moral genius of this book is that it traverses the open road of American mythology and brings us back to ourselves; it sees us not as we wish to be but as we are." Collected Poems (1988) and There You Are (1995) focus on the lives of everyday citizens, using simple diction and narratives to expose the bewildering reality of the American dream. Poet Mark Jarman hailed Simpson as "a poet of the American character and vernacular."

He received a Ph.D. from Columbia and taught there, as well as University of California, Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He currently lives on the north shore of Long Island near Stony Brook.

Awards

• 1962 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1964 Pulitzer Prize
• Prix de Rome.
• 1998 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
• 2004 Finalist, Griffin Poetry Prize (International)

Selected works

Poetry

• The Arrivistes: Poems, 1940-1949. Fine Editions Press. 1949. 
• Good News of Death. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1955 (in Poets of Today, Vol. 2). 
• A Dream of Governors: Poems. Wesleyan University Press. 1959. 
• At the End of the Open Road, Poems. Wesleyan University Press. 1963. ISBN 9780819520203. 
• Selected Poems. Harcourt, Brace & World. 1965. 
• Adventures of the Letter I. Harper & Row. 1971. 
• Searching for the Ox. Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 9780192118608. 
• Armidale. The Book Bus. 1979. 
• Caviare at the Funeral. F. Watts. 1980. ISBN 9780531099377. 
• The Best Hour of the Night. Ticknor & Fields. 1983. ISBN 9780899192031. 
• People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–83. BOA Editions. 1983. ISBN 9780918526434. 
• Collected Poems. Paragon House. 1988. ISBN 9781557780478. 
• In the Room We Share. Paragon House. 1990. ISBN 9781557782618. 
• There you are: poems. Story Line Press. 1995. ISBN 9781885266156. 
• The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940–2001. BOA Editions, Ltd.. 2003. ISBN 9781929918393. http://books.google.com/books?id=5yRlnpHSAFcC&dq=Louis+Aston+Marantz+Simpson&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=FuM-Sq7_BIq0NKu8zawH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5. 
• Struggling Times. BOA Editions, Ltd.. 2009. ISBN 97811934414194. 
• Voices in the Distance: Selected Poems. Bloodaxe Books. 2010. ISBN 9781852248611. 

Translations

• Louis Aston Marantz, ed. (1997). Modern poets of France: a bilingual anthology. Story Line Press. ISBN 9781885266446. 

Non-fiction

• James Hogg: a critical study. St. Martin's Press. 1962. 
• Louis Aston Marantz Simpson, ed. (1968). An introduction to poetry. Macmillan. 
• Air with armed men. London Magazine Editions. 1972 (US title: North of Jamaica). 
• Three on the Tower. Morrow. 1975. ISBN 9780688028992. 
• A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell. MacMillan. 1978. ISBN 9780026113205. 
• A Company of Poets. University of Michigan Press. 1981. ISBN 9780472063260. 
• The Character of the Poet. University of Michigan Press. 1986. ISBN 9780472093694. 
• Selected prose. Paragon House. 1989. ISBN 9781557780485. 
• Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry. University of Michigan Press. 1994. ISBN 9780472095599. 
• The King My Father's Wreck. Story Line Press. 1994. ISBN 9780934257091. 

External links

• "Louis Simpson". The Academy of American Poets. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/86. Retrieved 7 August 2005. 
• Poetry Foundation biographical essay and online poems
• Louis Simpson at the NNDB
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• Community remembers sacrifices in Harrison Daily, Harrison, Arkansas