So much of modern art is concerned with the reaction or depiction of an endowed and cultivated sensibility in a civilization dedicated to a shallow hedonism: the worship of cigarettes, TV sets, bowling, beer, and real estate. Many of Louis Simpson's finest poems, in a distinctive and unique way, are centered on this concern. His work prior to At the End of the Open Road (Wesleyan) approaches the situation somewhat objectively and critically; but his Open Road poems display more of a sense of direct personal involvement and a subjective transcension.

In the Pre-Open Road poems, he presents through indirections such as emblematic shepherds and the pastoral tradition the tragic folly of those who have disavowed the inner life to pursue an existence sold by the movie and advertising men. The earlier poetic organization is often traditionally formal, making use of stanzas and rhymes; but the formal patterns function as essential parts of the communication. The metrically controlled movement establishes an ironic undertone to a surface depicting the brutality of innocence, as in “The Green Shepherd”:

The vessel they ignored still sails away
So bravely on the water, Westward Ho!
And murdering, in a religious way,
Brings Jesus to the Gulf of Mexico.

Simpson's enameled aspersions toward these innocents, who in their gay lightness and in their pursuit of superficial sensuality become oblivious of human misery and the cruelties of progressive civilization, never is reduced to a monovoiced howl, or a lifeless editorial; but is achieved with an insight that perceives the situation in its totality, sensing both the amusing and tragic implications. Always present among the dispassionate and conventionalized flirtations is the greatest destroyer of pleasure, death. Perfect nakedness cannot entice death to forget its mission, and inevitably death will take the furniture away. “And grave by grave we civilize the ground.” Death is omnipresent, and often the earlier poems resemble rococo roses painted on a white skull.

Although basically objective, a subjective element, in the form of an “I,” does appear in some of the pre-Open Road poems. This “I” is usually a stranger, or someone apart, so much apart from the ordinary amusements of humanity that he can make the perspicacious observation, “And nothing is more melancholy / than to watch people enjoying themselves / as much as they can,” (“Côte d'Azur”). In “Hot Night on Water Street,” the stranger is confronted by a cigar-smoking innocent who is completely unaware of the brutal casualness of his remarks, “Since I've been in this town / I've seen one likely woman, and a car / As she was crossing Main Street, knocked her down.” Throughout the poems, the “I” is passive and never a real part of a situation. He goes to his room and reads the New York Times; but in Open Road there is often a transcendence of the scene through an inwardness, an outburst of inner life.

In Open Road the style loosens, the lines become uneven, and the movement of the natural voice and phrasal breaks replaces preconceived measurement. The imagery tends toward inwardness, and the result is a more phenomenal poetry, one in which the subjective imagination transforms by its own operations the objective into what constitutes genuine reality. Whether or not Simpson is developing toward a “deep image,” Spanish Surrealism, or some use of poetic language similar to Rene Char cannot be determined at this time, although I doubt if Simpson will ever become automatic, autotelic, or hermetic. One of Simpson's recent poems, published in Robert Bly's Sixties, is a brilliant satire on the current influence of Pablo Neruda; and demonstrates the clarity and aloofness of a perception that will never allow itself to be swallowed up by the mere fashionableness of a movement.

Simpson's poetry, in going beyond the mere literal, is becoming more inward, and is developing toward phenomenalism. This phenomenalism, found in Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Bly, James Wright, George Hitchcock, and W. S. Merwin, is one of the most exciting developments in American poetry since the ascendancy of the Williams-Olson-Zukofsky tradition and the vernacular experiments, but phenomenalism has been largely overlooked by the well-paid commentators who seek to please the public mind by dividing American poetry into two hostile and warring camps, the Academics and the Beats (or Wild Men, as they have recently been termed by Chad Walsh), as if poets were big businessmen trying to outsmart one another in order to gain a monopoly.

This new inwardness in Open Road is seen primarily in the imagery, as in the strange poem “The Cradle Trap,” when the reader is suddenly confronted with such exciting lines as “The light is telling / terrible stories,” and as in “The Troika” with “I have lost my father's horses” and “I held the bird.” Also, in the metaliteral scene in “On the Lawn at the Villa”:

We were all sitting there paralyzed
In the hot Tuscan afternoon,
And the bodies of the machine-gun crew were draped over the balcony.
So we sat there all afternoon.

The imagery still has the clarity, keeps something of the literal, but it is more inward and less logical than much of the earlier Simpson. It foretells a new direction. The new looseness of style allows the drift into inwardness, and the charm and urbanity that is diminished with the discarding of the formal style is replaced by a new excitement and new significance.