Louis Simpson

Louis Simpson (born March 27, 1923, Kingston, Jamaica—died September 14, 2012, Stony Brook, New York, U.S.) was a Jamaican-born American poet and critic, notable for his marked development in poetic style. In 1964, he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his volume At the End of the Open Road (1963).

At age 17 Simpson moved from Jamaica to New York City, where he attended Columbia University. Although his education was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army (1943–45), he graduated from Columbia in 1948 (Ph.D., 1959). During the 1950s he worked as a book editor and taught at Columbia and at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1967 he joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he became professor emeritus in the early 1990s.

Simpson’s early poetry—that of The Arrivistes: Poems, 1940–1949 (1949) and Good News of Death, and Other Poems (1955)—followed traditional forms and conventional rhyme and metrical patterns, though it treated such contemporary themes as war and the quality of life in the 20th century. In A Dream of Governors (1959), however, Simpson began to reflect the influence of Walt Whitman’s poetry and to experiment with free verse. Simpson came to believe that poetry springs from the inner life of the poet and that its expression should be original and natural. By the publication of his next book of poetry, At the End of the Open Road, the development of his poetic style was clear: the use of poetic conventions had been abandoned. Simpson’s later collections of poetry included Adventures of the Letter I (1971), Searching for the Ox (1976), Caviare at the Funeral (1980), The Best Hour of the Night (1983), and The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems (2003).

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In addition to writing poetry, Simpson produced several critical studies of other poets and an autobiography, North of Jamaica (1972; U.K. title Air with Armed Men). A collection of his essays and lectures, A Company of Poets, was published in 1981.