Poets

Born in Jamaica, West Indies, in 1923, Louis Simpson was the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother. He immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen, studied at Columbia University, then served in the Second World War with the 101st Airborne Division on active duty in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. After the war he continued his studies at Columbia and at the University of Paris.

While living in France he published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes (1949), for which the poet and critic Randall Jarrell wrote of Simpson, “He is a surprisingly live poet: as you read him you forget for a moment that we are the ancient.”

In the Spring 1997 issue of the Harvard Review, Simpson wrote: “It is the struggle to express the contemporary that makes poetry seem alive, and contemporary life can hardly be expressed in the forms used by poets four hundred years ago.”

Simpson worked as an editor in a publishing house in New York, then earned a Ph.D. at Columbia and went on to teach at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Simpson’s second collection of poems, Good News of Death and Other Poems was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons (in Poets of Today, Vol. 2), followed by A Dream of Governors: Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1959) and At the End of the Open Road, Poems (1963), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Louis Simpson went on to publish m..