The story American literature tells is so often that of a virtuous individual, who seeks complete freedom for self-expression, pitted against a community that is at best repressive and at worst unjust, perhaps even immoral. Consider Melville's White Jacket and Billy Budd, rebels against society's sanctioned injustices. Consider his Bartleby, who in response to every entreaty from his eminently reasonable, successful, middle-American boss, says “I would prefer not to.” Consider Huck Finn, who follows the promptings of his own heart, his innate sense of virtue, over what society tells him is right; “All right, then, I'll go to hell!,” he says, embracing the cause of his black friend, Jim. Consider Hester Prynne, whose devotion is to passion, human emotion—to natural virtue rather than civil virtue—against the moral repression of her Puritan society.

Consider too those writers who speak more or less for themselves rather than through a character, chiefly the American transcendentalists. There is Emerson, whose counsel was to follow always your own path, no matter if it has never been trod before. There is Thoreau, whose independence of mind exasperated even his friend and mentor Emerson—Thoreau, who was among the first to oppose the implicit support of slavery that he found in Massachusetts, and who opposed as well that proto-Vietnam adventure: the Mexican War of 1846–48. And there is Whitman, who sang of himself only as a means of encouraging others to be more themselves: “Not I—not any one else, can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.” These lists could be extended almost indefinitely—one thinks of Emily Dickinson, Isabel Archer, Edna Pontiellier, so many more. The point is clear: one of the most pervasive concerns of American literature has always been to support, promote, and encourage the individual vision, no matter how solid the opposition of the majority.

It is precisely this concern that we find at the heart of the poetry of Louis Simpson.¹ In recent years he has taken to writing narrative verse that uses many of the techniques of prose fiction. Thus we find in his work third-person protagonists who bear slight spiritual similarities to Huck Finn, Edna Pontiellier, and the others. Even at its most narrative, however, Simpson's poetry remains lyrical in its basis—and this means that the position of the individual sensibility in his work is defined most centrally by the personality of the poet himself. In his autobiography, North of Jamaica, Simpson gives the most important of his many definitions of poetry: “Poetry is essentially mysterious. No one has ever been able to define it. Therefore we always find ourselves coming back to the poet. As Stevens said, ‘Poetry is a process of the personality of the poet.’ This personality is never finished. While he is writing the poet has in mind another self, more intelligent than he. The poet is reaching out to the person that he would be, and this is the poet's style—a sense of reaching, that can never be satisfied.”²

This sense of reaching always for a better self, which makes Simpson's individual poems so dynamic, is also what caused the profound changes that have occurred in his poetry generally since the beginning of his career. We can, in fact, identify three distinct phases within this body of work. The poems in Simpson's first three books—The Arrivistes (1949), Good News of Death (1955), and A Dream of Governors (1959)—are written in tight, traditional English lyric forms, forms that have the effect of dissociating the poet's sensibility from the very material he is attempting to write about. In many of these early efforts, Simpson sounds rather like the new metaphysical poets, who had their vogue in the 1940s and 1950s. The lyric “As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs” is typical:

As birds are fitted to the boughs
That blossom on the tree
And whisper when the south wind blows—
So was my love to me.
And still she blossoms in my mind
And whispers softly, though
The clouds are fitted to the wind,
The wind is to the snow.(3)

However successful this poem is, there is nothing about it that is unique to the vision or voice of Louis Simpson—the subject is as conventional as the form, and we may be excused the feeling that it could have been written by almost anyone, including a poet (perhaps especially a poet) living three-hundred years ago.

In fact, “As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs” is a “poem nearly anonymous” (as John Crowe Ransom might have said of it)—its form and sentiment both seem predetermined—inherited, not from the personal experience of the author, but from literary history. In addition to poems about love, these early books also contain most of Simpson's war poems. After coming to this country from his native Jamaica in 1940, at the age of seventeen, Simpson enlisted in the United States Army, serving first in the tank corps, then in the infantry; he was among the first to go ashore at Normandy and was awarded the Bronze Star for distinguished service and the Purple Heart for his injuries. One might expect his war poems to blister with immediate, felt experience; such is not the case, however. Again, the author's personality is buried beneath the demands of a form imposed from without rather than generated from within. Thus, even in the best of these poems, we feel, not the force of the poet's experience, but the force of his mastery of traditional English lyricism. “Carentan O Carentan,” for example, is a powerful war lyric; I quote stanzas from the beginning, the middle, and the end:

Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.
… … … … … … … …
I must lie down at once, there is
A hammer at my knee.
And call it death or cowardice,
Don't count again on me.
Everything's all right, Mother,
Everyone gets the same
At one time or another.
It's all in the game.
I never strolled, nor ever shall,
Down such a leafy lane.
I never drank in a canal,
Nor ever shall again.
… … … … … …
Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do.

(PLH, 37–38)

The lyricism is beautiful, the irony between that formal characteristic and the content of the poem profound, but again the personal voice of Louis Simpson is missing.

When Simpson agrees with Stevens that “Poetry is a process of the personality of the poet,” he is, among other things, also agreeing with Buffon's definition, “The style is the man.” As he himself has explained, it was because he wanted to express his own personality more directly that Simpson undertook, between the publication of his third and fourth books, to change his style: “I had been writing poetry that was quite formal. … Over the next few years, I tried to write impeccable poems, poems you couldn't find fault with. Then between 1959 and 1963 I broke all that up and tried to write poetry that would be more free, that would sound more like my own voice. … Ever since then I've written mostly a kind of informal poetry.”⁴ In the second and third phases of Simpson's career, then, we encounter an authentic poetry of personality. Moreover, once he had made this important transition, it appears that Simpson was able to look back and define more clearly the relationship between the missing sensibility of his early poems and the society in which that sensibility attempted to live; I will begin my larger discussion of Simpson's work with these more or less anachronistic poems, poems that, by virtue of their content, actually (though not chronologically) belong in the first phase of his career.

The middle phase of Simpson's work consists of all of the poems in his fourth book, At the End of the Open Road (1963), and many of those in Adventures of the Letter I (1971), a transitional volume. The individual portrayed in these poems feels himself seriously alienated from American society, which in his view had not only killed the American Indians but was also participating, indefensibly, in an unjust war in Vietnam. Then a curious thing happens, marking the transition from the second to the third phase of Simpson's work—through a dual interest in the work of Chekhov and in his own Jewish Russian ancestors, the sensibility of these poems recognizes his inherent kinship with the ordinary citizens of the society he had been hating. He realizes that it is not they but their leaders who are responsible for what is wrong and repressive in that society. Thus, the third phase of Simpson's work is the empathetic, even the spiritual phase—the phase in which he comes to do his most memorable and original work. It begins with the Russian poems in Adventures of the Letter I and continues with the poems of middle America in Searching for the Ox (1976), Caviar at the Funeral (1980), and The Best Hour of the Night (1983).

Before proceeding any farther, we must pause to make a crucial distinction. Although Louis Simpson writes a poetry of personality, and although the most important unifying feature of his work is the sensibility that lies at its heart, he is not a confessional poet. In fact, Simpson has been very hard on this type of poetry, which he sees as part of the “cult of sincerity” (“Interview with Louis Simpson”). Confessional poetry is personal because it takes for its subject matter the literal details of the poet's life and feelings, the truth of that life as lived in the real world; Simpson's poetry is personal because it emerges from and expresses a single, central, perceiving sensibility. Although the effect of this can be even more intimate than what the reader experiences in confessional poetry, it is achieved while the poet maintains a reticent posture with regard to the external details of his life. In fact, Simpson prefers to speak of the sensibility that inhabits his poems as a created character—based upon himself, to be sure, but made up nevertheless: “I have a very funny sense of myself in the poem—I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about how the poems make a self for me.”⁵ How that might come about is explained in greater detail in the Afterword to Simpson's book A Revolution in Taste, where he gives a summary definition of what he means by a poetry of personality: “In contrast to this, what I have called the personal voice is an expression of character. And character is something made. The self that appears in the novel or poem has been constructed according to certain aesthetic principles. This version of the self is not intended to direct attention upon the author but to serve the work of art. The purpose is to create a symbolic life, a portrait of the artist that will have meaning for others and so create a sense of community, if only among a few thousand.”⁶

The sensibility that unifies the poems of Louis Simpson, then, is this created “symbolic life,” this “portrait of the artist”; it is a sensibility intended to express not just the personal feelings of one person but those of at least a small minority community existing within society at large. It is not until the last phase of his work, however, that Simpson's poetry will truly begin to embody this sense of community. In the first two phases we see instead a sensibility largely alienated from the society that surrounds it. As I said earlier, our understanding of the position of the Simpson sensibility in the first phase will come not so much from the poems actually written then but from later poems that comment on that phase. These poems, in fact, mostly appear together in the first section of Simpson's recent book, People Live Here: Selected Poems, 1949–1983—a structuring that indicates that they do indeed belong, because of their content, with the first phase.

For example, the poem “The Cradle Trap” (PLH, 28), originally published in At the End of the Open Road, seems to define the alienation of the Simpson character at almost its first moment of consciousness. The experience and feelings of the poem are those of a baby and are presented in the first two stanzas:

A bell and rattle,
a smell of roses,
a leather Bible,
and angry voices …
They say, I love you.
They shout, You must!
The light is telling
terrible stories.

The forces of society are represented by the baby's parents, who are willing to use every means at their disposal, including both violence and love, to impose their will upon him. In Simpson's poems generally, as here, the depersonalizing forces of society are associated with an unforgiving light, while darkness represents individuality and self-fulfillment. Thus, it is the darkness that offers support and advice to the baby in the concluding stanza of this poem:

But night at the window
whispers, Never mind.
Be true, be true
to your own strange kind.

What is presented here in embryonic form is the conflict between the individual and the community that will dominate so much of Simpson's poetry. Already this particular character is seen as different from most people, one of a “strange kind.” As we will learn in later poems, this strangeness results from a commitment not just to poetry but to a life of the mind generally.

While “The Cradle Trap” seems to set the Simpson character against all of society and both of his parents, another poem, “Working Late” (PLH, 168), indicates a potential for harmony that we will see fully manifested in phase three. The title of the poem refers to the speaker's father, a lawyer of precise and methodical character—“A light is on in my father's study”:

He is working late on cases.
No impassioned speech! He argues from evidence,
actually pacing out and measuring,
while the fans revolving on the ceiling
winnow the true from the false.

Within the context of the poem, the father represents society, as his association with the artificial light source indicates. That there is something of value even here, however, is implicit in the way the poem ends:

                                        … the light that used to shine
at night in my father's study
now shines as late in mine.

However, the real sense of kinship in the poem is felt between the speaker and his mother, who is both associated with the darkness and seen in conflict with the father:

All the arguing in the world
will not stay the moon.
She has come all the way from Russia
to gaze for a while in a mango tree
and light the wall of a veranda,
before resuming her interrupted journey.

The poem is autobiographical. Simpson's father was a lawyer; his mother, a passionate and restless woman of Russian ancestry, who happened to come with a dance troupe to Jamaica, was courted by and married the elder Simpson, and left him some years later, when the poet was nearly grown. She functions as a sort of muse within the poem, prefiguring those human qualities that will characterize Simpson's maturest work—chiefly, the feeling of love, a sense of independence, devotion to the freedom of the self and to the creative spirit; identifying her with the moon, Simpson says: “she is still the mother of us all.” For fullest expression, most of this will have to wait for phase three; until then, the sensibility that rules these poems contends instead with the negative, antagonistic feelings of betrayal expressed in “The Cradle Trap.”

At the end of the first section of his new selected poems, Simpson has placed three poems that also stand together at the end of Adventures of the Letter I—“Trasimeno,” “The Peat-Bog Man,” and “The Silent Piano.” The poems have much in common—each associates the light of day with a society that is somehow oppressive to the individual; each identifies as well a fugitive sense of spirituality, creativity, which is associated with the night and the moon and opposed to the forces of society. Perhaps we may take the middle poem (PLH, 33) as representative. Seamus Heaney, that fine Ulster poet, tells many stories of the peat bogs of Ireland, which have a way of preserving anything (including human bodies) that happens to fall into them. Centuries later, peat cutters will come upon these things, perfectly preserved. The title character of Simpson's poem “was one of the consorts of the moon” who “went with the goddess in a cart”: “Wherever he went there would be someone, / a few of the last of the old religion.” Once this brief characterization has been given, “the moon passes behind a cloud”; we don't see the peat-bog man again until, “Fifteen centuries” later, he is dug up—

                                        … with the rope
that ends in a noose at the throat—
a head squashed like a pumpkin.

Simpson implies that the man was executed; apparently his sensitive, religious, poetic nature came into conflict with a brutal and repressive society. At the end of the poem, Simpson associates him with the creative spirit of earth, allowing for an indirect triumph after all:

Yet, there is delicacy in the features
and a peaceful expression …
that in Spring the flower comes forth
with a music of pipes and dancing.

Because of its method, the poem seems to offer almost a blanket condemnation of how such individuals have been treated by societies throughout time. The poem is nearly allegorical, generalizing as it does from an incident that is both ancient and vague. “The Peat-Bog Man” thus reflects a quality common to most of the poems in Simpson's first three books: they do not often deal directly, personally, with the actual world inhabited at the time of composition by the poet himself. It was not until 1963, with the publication of his fourth book, At the End of the Open Road—significantly following the major change in style discussed above—that Simpson began to write specifically about America, where he had been living for better than twenty years.

If not a paradox, it is at least a curiosity that Louis Simpson—that native Jamaican—has become, since the beginning of the second phase of his career, the most consciously American of all contemporary American poets.⁷ This is true, not just because he has come to write mostly about American life and people, but because the sensibility that informs his poems from their creative heart thinks of himself as an American—for better (phase three) or for worse (phase two). In an essay written as early as 1962, Simpson recognized that his work was moving in this direction: “I think a great deal about the country I live in indeed, it seems an inexhaustible subject, one that has hardly been tapped. By America, I mean the infinitely complex life we have. Sometimes when I look at Main Street, I feel like a stranger looking at the via Aurelia, or the Pyramids.”⁸ It is interesting that James Wright commented on this aspect of Simpson's work in his own essay on Walt Whitman: “Louis Simpson's imagination is obsessed with the most painful details of current American life, which he reveals under a very powerfully developed sense of American history. … Mr. Simpson describes America and Americans in a vision totally free from advertising and propaganda.”⁹

As mentioned earlier, the poems in phase two are the bitterest of Simpson's career. It is almost as though, rebounding from the horrors of World War II, his protagonist felt danger lurking behind every bush, a murderous stench at large in the very atmosphere. He became an idealist, venting his anger most vigorously upon the hypocrites of this world, those who profess noble, moral aims while wallowing in the mire of man's inhumanity to man. The poem “On the Lawn at the Villa” (PLH, 54) is set in Tuscany just after World War II, and seems to take for its theme the contrast between American innocence and European sophistication, implying that the latter is cunning, given to evil, the former a sweetness yielding only to virtue.

Though the theme of the poem seems to come from Henry James, its voice sounds more like Augie March or Studs Lonigan—a wise guy who has read Whitman. He begins the poem by commenting on his title:

On the lawn at the villa—
That's the way to start, eh, reader?
We know where we stand—somewhere expensive—
You and I imperturbes, as Walt would say,
Before the diversions of wealth, you and I engagés.

The irony of the voice seems at this point to be directed against the hollowness, the falseness, of wealthy European society, an impression that is strengthened when the speaker introduces his companions—“a manufacturer of explosives,” his wife, and “a young man named Bruno”—and goes on to justify his own presence at this little tea party. He is, he says:

Willing to talk to these malefactors,
The manufacturer of explosives, and so on,
But somehow superior. By that I mean democratic.
It's complicated, being an American,
Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.

On its surface level, the poem suggests that it is people like the manufacturer of explosives who make war possible, thus perpetuating the kind of thing that destroyed “The Peat-Bog Man.” The American is supposedly superior, if only because he can see the immorality inherent in this situation. However, there is another level of irony in the poem; being American is more “complicated” than it at first seems. While the speaker pretends to believe the American line, in fact he is directing his most serious criticism against it. He suggests that it is the Americans who are the greatest hypocrites in such situations. The arms maker pretends nothing; the American pretends to approve of the arms maker (no doubt for the “money” involved), meanwhile believing that he can preserve his own moral superiority through a “bad conscience.” That this is a delusion is made clear through an image Simpson uses in the poem's concluding stanza:

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

Everyone in the scene, that is, ignores this very basic reality, and all are equally guilty.

Poems from this phase that are set in America are, if anything, even more bitter than “On the Lawn at the Villa.” Basically, Simpson chooses to contrast the American Dream—of justice, equality, freedom, and peace—with the reality he was observing around him. Most of these poems were written during the early phase of America's involvement in the war in Vietnam, at a time when American opinion supported that involvement. In an essay first published—ironically—in William Heyen's bicentennial anthology, American Poets in 1976, Simpson comments on the reaction of American poets to Vietnam by speaking first of how William Wordsworth felt when his country sided with the government against the peasants during the French Revolution: “he was cut off in his affections from the people around him. It is hard to imagine a more desolate situation for a poet, and it is the situation American poets have found themselves in for some time. It would be bad enough if poets alone felt so, but what poets feel many other people are feeling too. The United States contains a large number of people who no longer like it.”¹⁰ The people who no longer like it, in fact, are those few of a “strange kind,” first mentioned in “The Cradle Trap.”

In a poem with the ironic title “American Dreams” (PLH, 79), Simpson defines the position occupied by such a person in this country at that time. The poem begins by contrasting the kind of dreams the Simpson protagonist would normally have with a redefined version of the American Dream:

In dreams my life came toward me,
my loves that were slender as gazelles.
But America also dreams. …
Dream, you are flying over Russia,
dream, you are falling in Asia.

We are reminded that the American Dream has not been limited to the basic definition given above. The English Puritans came here originally in pursuit of religious freedom—and immediately proceeded to outlaw all religious but their own. They also saw the American Indians as the Devil's minions, and set about to eradicate them from the face of the earth. This particular aspect of the American Dream is celebrated by Simpson in yet another poem, “Indian Country,” where he describes how “The white men burst in at sunrise, shooting and stabbing …, / the squaws running in every direction” (PLH, 68). Were we to view this as a kind of genocide, and were we to combine that with yet another aspect of the American Dream (the one that sees the open road leading ever westward to new horizons), then we might have found an explanation for the American bombs falling in Asia.

The second stanza of “American Dreams” expresses the feelings of the speaker through an image as violent and surreal as the one that concludes “On the Lawn at the Villa”: “on a typical sunny day in California,” he dreams:

it is my house that is burning
and my dear ones that lie in the gutter
as the American army enters.

The feeling is one of intense alienation; the speaker is committed to the original American Dream of peace and freedom for all, while his fellow citizens seem bent on forcing the entire world to conform to their way of life. The poem concludes:

Every day I wake far away
from my life, in a foreign country.
These people are speaking a strange language.
It is strange to me
and strange, I think, even to themselves.

The situation is strange to the speaker because he is of the minority, one of that “strange kind” that remembers the basic moral principles on which this country was founded. That the situation may have been strange as well “even to themselves”—that is, even to ordinary citizens—history has come to prove through the eventual turning of public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Thus at the time of the poem, their behavior was unnatural, an unaccustomed hypocrisy.

Another, somewhat earlier, poem on the American Dream is the famous “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain” (PLH, 64–65), originally published in At the End of the Open Road. It begins with a challenge to the statue of Whitman, asking “Where is the nation you promised?” and complaining that “The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.” Simpson refers to the degeneration of yet another aspect of the original Dream. Our ancestors only hoped for sufficient material goods to get by on, a chicken in every pot; we have progressed to the point where our insatiable hunger for wealth is scarring the countryside, polluting the air, and dropping either a porn emporium or a pizza shack on every village corner. Whitman is blamed because of the boundless opportunity that he seemed to promise and because his writings have been used by publicists and polemicists to forward just these debased goals. Simpson goes on to imagine an answer from Whitman, who points out that it was not the future of the country he was prophesying, “it was Myself / I advertised”—“I gave no prescriptions”—“I am wholly disreputable.” Suddenly, for the speaker, “All that grave weight of America” is “cancelled.” All those who have “contracted / American dreams”—“the realtors, / Pickpockets, salesmen”—can go their own ways, performing their “Official scenarios”; the individual has been freed to pursue his vision:

                    … the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she's dumb,
And the earth, are relieved.

The answer that the speaker has found for this stage of his life is to try to ignore what goes on around him, to cultivate his own “Myself” in a kind of protective isolation—to live, that is, what is described in the poem's epigraph (from Ortega y Gasset): a “life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence.”

It is in another poem, “Sacred Objects” (originally published in Adventures of the Letter I), that Simpson gives a capsule version of the general lesson learned from Whitman; he says: “The light that shines through the Leaves / is clear: ‘to form individuals’” (PLH, 178). The attempt to be true to the singular, individual vision of the self is the quest that entered Simpson's work once he decided upon a personal theory of poetry. It is given eloquent testimony in yet another poem from this period, “Summer Morning.” Thinking back over fifteen years, the speaker recalls a morning spent with a woman in a hotel room, from which they watched workers across the way. The separation between him and them was more than just physical, as he now recognizes:

I'm fifteen years older myself—
Bad years and good.
So I have spoiled my chances.
For what? Sheer laziness,
The thrill of an assignation,
My life that I hold in secret.

(PLH, 90)

The tone of the poem is not one of regret but of triumph. The speaker's chances for a commercial life have been spoiled, it is true, but that is no loss; it is far preferable to have lived a life devoted to fugitive emotions, devoted to an individual vision, no matter how unpopular—a life devoted to that least commercial of all serious pursuits, poetry.¹¹

Perhaps the strongest general impression one takes away from the poems written during this second phase of Simpson's career is of the alienation from society that his protagonist feels. Sometimes his attitude is bitter and sarcastic about that society; at other times he is sullen and withdrawn, almost sulking; at still other times he is strong, proud, defiant. In all cases, however, the alienation persists. Moreover, his distrust is not just of those who are obviously misguided (political leaders, pickpockets) but of common people as well—his fellow citizens, the workers in the window across the way. At the End of the Open Road, source of most of these poems and Simpson's most negative book, was published in 1963. Between then and 1971, when the transitional volume Adventures of the Letter I was published, his work began to develop away from this attitude towards a stronger feeling of brotherly love. An indirect but telling comment on what was happening can be found in his essay “Dogface Poetics,” first published in 1965: “In recent years the closemouthed, almost sullen, manner of my early poems has given way to qualities that are quite different. Like other men of the war generation, I began with middle age; youth came later. Nowadays in my poems I try to generate mystery and excitement; I have even dealt in general ideas. But I retain the dogface's suspicion of the officer class, with their abstract language and indifference to individual, human suffering. You might say that the war made me a foot-soldier for the rest of my life.”¹²

The difference as expressed here is slight but significant; Simpson is coming to empathize more emphatically with his fellow “footsoldiers” and their ordinary “human suffering.” No longer will his protagonist feel so “cut off in his affections from the people around him”; he will not hold the citizenry at large responsible for such atrocities as the American participation in Vietnam—that rap will be pinned on those who earn it, the “officer class” generally. The most important change in Simpson's work as he moves into the third phase of his career, then, is the increased sense of empathy those poems express for other people.¹³ The change in attitude—and in method of operation—on the part of the Simpson protagonist is made clear in a poem like “The Mexican Woman” (PLH, 103), originally published in Caviare at the Funeral. In the first section of this poem, the speaker is panhandled by an old man who claims to have been “in Mexico with Black Jack Pershing”:

He lived with a Mexican woman.
Then he followed her, and was wise.
“Baby,” he said, “you're a two-timer,
I'm wise to you and the lieutenant.”

The second section tells the reaction of the speaker to this chance encounter; “the old man's tale still haunts me,” he begins:

I know what it's like to serve
in Mexico with Black Jack Pershing.
And to walk in the dust and heat …
for I can see her hurrying
to the clay wall where they meet,
and I shall be wise to her and the lieutenant.

Through the use of his imagination, the speaker is able to become the old man, able to experience a portion of his life. The poem is curiously both objective and subjective; objective because of the interest in the life and concerns of a character other than the speaker, but subjective in that it is also his story, the story of his imagination.

In its use of a narrative structure and reliance on significant details that illuminate action, character, and meaning, this poem resembles prose fiction.¹⁴ Simpson is the author of one novel, Riverside Drive, published in 1962, and has recently talked about writing another. In fact—if such things can be judged by what the protagonist of his poems says—it would appear that as a young man Simpson may have aspired more to writing fiction than poetry. For example, the speaker in “Sway” remembers a summer spent courting the already engaged girl whose nickname gives the poem its title: “Sway was beautiful. My heart went out to her”; “I told her of my ambition: / to write novels conveying the excitement / of life” (PLH, 108). In another poem, “The Man She Loved,” the speaker remembers how, as a young student at Columbia, he would visit his relatives in Brooklyn on Sundays and spend at least part of the afternoon indulging in youthful, charmingly egotistical fantasies:

Little did they know as they spoke
that one day they would be immortal
in a novel that commanded the sweep
of Tolstoy, a magnificent creation
that would bring within its compass
offices in Manhattan and jungles
of the Amazon. A grasp of psychology
and sense of the passing of time
that can only be compared to,
without exaggerating, Proust.

(PLH, 105)

And yet, despite this ambition, despite his skill at manipulating narrative, detail, and imagery, Simpson did not become a good novelist. In fact, it is in the poem “Sway” that he himself gives what is probably the best critique of Riverside Drive, as of his talent as a fiction writer generally. During that summer long ago, the girl has asked:

                    … “When you're a famous novelist
will you write about me?”
I promised … and tried to keep my promise.

Years later the speaker comes upon the resulting pages in an old box; the images are touching, the buildup to action promising, but: “Then the trouble begins. I can never think of anything / to make the characters do” (PLH, 110). The failure occurs in the area of plot—the individual scenes of Riverside Drive are pointed and affecting, excellent at conveying mood, but they never add up to a cohesive overall statement. In short, Simpson's fiction embodies all the qualities that would be needed should one wish to write a narrative kind of lyric poetry—which is precisely the choice he ultimately made. In an essay published in 1976, he explains in hypothetical terms the use to which such a poetry would put narrative: “As it deals with life, this poetry will frequently be in the form of a narrative. Not a mere relation of external events, but a narrative of significant actions. The poet will aim to convey states of feeling. In our time poets have stayed away from narrative because it has often been merely descriptive—there has been too much dead tissue. But this can be avoided if the poet reveals a situation with no more than a few words, and concentrates on the feeling.”¹⁵

Narrative is used in Simpson's best poems, then, not to channel action towards an exciting climax but to organize images and relatively minor incidents towards some revelation of personality and feeling. Because this poetry is more or less static in terms of external action, imagery is of considerable importance in the achievement of its effects. Simpson, in fact, considers himself a kind of latter-day imagist poet, which makes his definition of the goal of imagist writing important here: “There is a time lag, therefore a separation, between thought and experience. The more elaborate the comparison, as in Milton's epic similes, the harder it is to ‘feel’ the thought. An imagist poem, on the other hand, concentrates on giving you the experience—handing over sensations bodily, as Hulme said. Imagist writing aims to make you feel, rather than to tell you what feeling is like.”¹⁶ In Simpson's use of imagery there is something of the idea behind Eliot's objective correlative: if the image is properly prepared for and invested with appropriate suggestions, it should call up in the reader the same emotions it evokes in the author or in the character he is writing about.

Most often, the feelings that are expressed in the poems of phase three are again those of the Simpson protagonist, the sensibility that has always been at the heart of his work. However, because of the greater degree of empathy that informs this phase, we find poems as well that are spoken by characters who are obviously different from this one; also, there are poems written from the third-person point of view, in which Simpson imagines from the outside and sympathetically presents the feelings of another. Simpson is, in short, actively following advice he gave indirectly to Robert Lowell in a review written in 1977: “He ought to try getting inside the skin of a few people who aren't like himself.”¹⁷ Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Simpson's recent work is just how different the people he writes about are—not just from the sensibility that inhabits his work, but from the characters who appear in contemporary American poetry generally. In fact, without the example of Simpson, we might not be able to tell just how special, how atypical, that cast of characters generally is.

Most contemporary poets, of course, write primarily about their own personalities; Simpson is no exception to this rule. When we get beyond this level, what we generally find is characters who are very much like the poets—sensitive, intelligent, well-educated, of refined taste in food, music, literature, what have you. When we go beyond the poet as character in the poems of Simpson's phase three, by contrast, what we find are the ordinary citizens of America—not college professors and orchestra conductors, not manual laborers and nuclear protestors, but middle-class burghers; people who shop in shopping centers rather than in boutiques; people who watch Love Boat rather than Masterpiece Theatre; people who worry about their mortgages, their false teeth, their teenage children when they don't come home on time. Simpson's goal is to write, not about an unusual and privileged way of life, but about the life most real people are living in this country today. As he said in his address to the Jewish Book Council in 1981: “At the present time American poetry has very little to say about the world we live in. The American poet is content to have a style that sets him apart, to produce a unique sound, to create unusual images. But in my poems I have been attempting to explore ordinary, everyday life with the aim of showing that it can be deep, that though the life itself may not be poetic and, in fact, can be banal and sordid, yet it is the stuff of poetry, and the kind of poetry I believe to be most important—that which shows our common humanity.”¹⁸

“Quiet Desperation” (BHN, 15–17), which appears in Simpson's most recent individual book of poems, The Best Hour of the Night (1983), is written from the third-person point of view and concerns a single day in the life of an unnamed citizen of suburbia. The poem begins while this man is doing errands, probably on a Saturday afternoon:

At the post office he sees Joe McInnes.
Joe says, “We're having some people over.
It'll be informal. Come as you are.”

When our hero arrives home, he finds his wife preparing dinner, “an experiment”:

He relays Joe's invitation.
“No,” she says, “not on your life.
Muriel McInnes is no friend of mine.”
It appears that she told Muriel
that the Goldins live above their means,
and Muriel told Mary Goldin.
He listens carefully, to get things right.
The feud between the Andersons and the Kellys
began with Ruth Anderson calling Mike Kelly
a reckless driver. Finally
the Andersons had to sell their house and move.
Social life is no joke.
It can be the only life there is.

At first reading, a passage like this sounds very much like prose. One thing that makes it poetry is the understatement, the restraint and precision, of the writing. The lines are mostly end-stopped, and many of them consist of single sentences; there is nothing here of the easy flow prose normally has. There is also no extravagance in the images and incidents; again, everything is kept to a careful and pointed minimum. Finally, as is characteristic of lyric poetry to a far greater degree than of prose, the passage depends for its coherence less on its details than on the sensibility that perceives and reflects on these details. The plainness of language is typical of Simpson in this phase; like Wordsworth (and others) before him, he wishes to write his poems essentially out of the mouths of his ordinary characters; as he has said in an essay: “In my attempts to write narrative poetry I have used the rhythms of speech. I bear in mind what it would be like to say the poem aloud to someone else. This helps me to form the lines. At the same time it eliminates confusion—I have to make my ideas clear. I eliminate words out of books, affected language, jargon of any kind.”¹⁹

In the second section of the poem, the protagonist goes into the living room where his son is watching a movie on television: “the battle of Iwo Jima / is in progress.” He watches for a moment; the Americans are pinned down by machine-gun fire; a man falls; “Sergeant Stryker / picks up the charge and starts running.” He watches until the pillbox is destroyed by Stryker, then gets up and goes out: “He's seen the movie. Stryker gets killed / just as they're raising the flag.” This man is restless and dissatisfied, and as the third section of the poem begins, we learn what he is feeling:

A feeling of pressure …
There is something that needs to be done
immediately.
                                        But there is nothing,
only himself. His life is passing,
and afterwards there will be eternity,
silence, and infinite space.
He thinks, “Firewood!”—
and goes to the basement.

After cutting several logs into the proper size, arranging them carefully by the fireplace—but still restless, still feeling the pressure—he thinks of “The dog! / He will take the dog for a walk.”

It is autumn and the trees are turning yellow; approaching “the cove,” he admires the blue water and the swans. The poem ends:

But when you come closer
the rocks above the shore are littered
with daggers of broken glass
where the boys sat on summer nights
and broke beer bottles afterwards.
And the beach is littered, with cans,
containers, heaps of garbage,
newspaper wadded against the sea-wall.
Someone has even dumped a mattress …
a definite success!
Some daring guy, some Stryker
in the pickup speeding away.
He cannot bear the sun
going over and going down …
the trees and houses vanishing
in quiet every day.

The story of an ordinary mid-life crisis perhaps, but told with sympathy and from the inside of the man who is suffering through it. He feels his age when he looks at his son, when he remembers how long ago it was that he first saw the movie; he feels the futility of his life in the encounters with his wife and Joe McInnes, the emptiness of human contact. All around him are images of mortality—the death of Stryker, the firewood, the yellow leaves on the trees—culminating in the image of the setting sun, how everything is “vanishing” into “eternity / silence, and infinite space.”

“Quiet Desperation” establishes a common ground of ordinary human feelings where the guiding sensibility of Simpson's poems and his middle-class protagonist can meet to share what they have in common. There are many poems like this in the third phase of Simpson's work, poems that express, on the part of that sensibility, an authentic degree of empathy for humankind generally. However, there are also many poems in this phase that express something that may seem contrary to this—the continuing recognition by the Simpson sensibility of a difference between himself and most other people. It is not the feelings themselves that make him different, nor their quality and depth; rather, it is the degree to which these feelings are speculated upon and understood. This realization does not lessen the empathy felt by the protagonist, but it does reinforce his sense of isolation, of an ultimate and irremediable aloneness.

“Encounter on the 7:07,” also from The Best Hour of the Night (8–12), is spoken from the first-person point of view and puts the Simpson speaker in contact with a man something like the central character of “Quiet Desperation.” Again, the poem is long, in this case organized into six sections. The speaker is riding a commuter train when “a man of about forty, with a suntan” gets on and sits next to him. The man's doctor had advised a vacation, so he had gone to Florida. Meanwhile, on the train itself there is a “car card advertising / ‘Virginia Slims’”:

The man sitting next to me,
whose name is Jerry—Jerry DiBello—
observes that he doesn't smoke cigarettes,
he smokes cigars. “Look at Winston Churchill.
He smoked cigars every day of his life,
and he lived to be over eighty.”

An ordinary guy who likes to talk—the advertisement provides enough of an excuse for this personal comment.

Later he says that “His family used to own a restaurant,” that his father had come “from Genoa / as a seaman, and jumped ship,” got a job washing dishes, and “Ten years later / he owned the restaurant.” Jerry goes on to say that he sells cars, etc.,

But I'm not listening—I'm on deck,
looking at the lights of the harbor.
A sea wind fans my cheek.
I hear the waves chuckling
against the side of the ship.

The passage illustrates that same empathy, that same imaginative absorption into the skin of another character, that we saw in “The Mexican Woman.”²⁰

The thematic heart of this poem comes in its fifth section; the speaker says that he had brought along a copy of Ulysses to read on the train and begins by giving D. H. Lawrence's opinion of the book:

“An olla putrida …
old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations,”
said Lawrence. Drawing a circle about himself
and Frieda … building an ark,
envisioning the Flood.
But the Flood may be long coming.
In the meantime there is life
every day, and Ennui.
Ever since the middle class
and money have ruled our world
we have been desolate.
… … … … … … …
A feeling of being alone
and separate from the world …
“alienation” psychiatrists call it.
Religion would say, this turning away
from life is the life of the soul.
This is why Joyce is such a great writer:
he shows a life of fried bread
and dripping “like a boghole,”
an art that rises out of life
and flies toward the sun,
transfiguring as it flies
the reality.

The problem that the sensibility of Simpson's poems faces is that the society of which he is a part is so much more superficial in its interests than he is; it is committed to money, to the everyday problems of work, but ignores the depths of human emotion, the life of the soul. Lawrence provides no answer, because he went to the opposite extreme; he wrote of the depths but ignored the superficial realities of life. Thus, it is left to James Joyce to be the literary hero of this poem, the one who could write about both things at the same time, transfiguring reality while flying it toward the sun. This is precisely the goal that the speaker of “The Man She Loved” had wanted to express to his relatives:

… how could he explain what it meant to be a writer …
a world that was entirely different,
and yet it would include the sofa
and the smell of chicken cooking.

(PLH, 105)

The alienation of Simpson's protagonist results precisely from his devotion to the things that are unseen by the middle class generally—a full range of genuine emotions, the life of the soul. In the final section of “Encounter on the 7:07,” we are returned to Jerry DiBello, who had encountered a hurricane during his stay in Florida; “For days afterwards they were still finding bodies”:

When he went for a walk
the shore looked as though it had been swept
with a broom. The sky was clear,
the sun was shining, and the sea was calm.
He felt that he was alone with the universe.
He, Jerry DiBello, was at one with God.

Although a casual reader might not at first think so, these lines are neither satirical nor sarcastic; they give a straightforward, even sympathetic, rendering of the feelings this automobile salesman had when confronted with a vision of the ultimate. We must remember that he only went on this trip because of a doctor's orders, thus bringing with him a newly discovered awareness of his own mortality. As the poem ends, the speaker recognizes both his difference from DiBello and the human bond that they share.

Reactions to poems like these vary, but a common one is the assumption that Simpson is being satirical.²¹ In the interview that follows, Simpson described both the original response to his poem “The Beaded Pear” and his motivation:

The poem is meant to be absolutely descriptive of the kind of domestic life we actually live in this country today. When the poem first came out—in the Long Island newspaper Newsday—it upset a lot of people. I got hate mail from people who thought I was being devastatingly sarcastic. But I don't see it that way. There is an element of ridicule in the poem, but it is directed at the culture which fosters these kinds of values, not at the people themselves. No—mostly it is a purely descriptive poem, an attempt at absolutely dead-on, accurate truth. There is even a touch of pathos at the end.

This attitude is given further amplification in yet another comment in the same interview: “Now this may be romantic, but I feel that the ordinary people are pretty decent, even though their attitudes may not be mine. I don't feel that they're at all contemptible. I mean the people you meet in a shoestore or pub or shopping mall. I have always felt that there is a lot of poetry in those people.”

And yet those crucial differences between the Simpson protagonist and the average middle-class citizen remain. It is the expression of these differences that makes some readers think such poems are satirical. The tone of these poems is an extremely delicate one and results from the understatement and restraint that is built into their form. Simpson is attempting to balance very different opinions of two nearly identical things—his empathy for the people and his contempt for the values by which they sometimes live their lives. How delicate this tone is, how hard for some readers to understand, is indicated by the following, rather remarkably misguided, judgment: “Louis Simpson's work now suggests too much comfort: emotional, physical, intellectual. He has stopped struggling, it seems, for words, for rhythms, for his own deepest self. His is a middle-class, middle-brow poetry, the major value of which is to steer other poets from the same course, and to raise some questions about poets joining an Establishment, whether it be one of social class, national or literary identification.”²²

How far Louis Simpson is from joining the middle-class “Establishment” is apparent in another new poem, the longest of his career. “The Previous Tenant” (BHN, 21–36) consists of ten sections and deals once again with the conflict between society and the individual. It is spoken from the first-person point of view by the Simpson sensibility and is primarily concerned with the story of his alienation from the suburban community in which he lives—ironically named Point Mercy. The speaker's awareness of his own alienation is brought to the surface through the story of Dr. Hugh McNeil, whose illicit love affair makes him the enemy of the forces of decency in the town. The speaker is renting a cottage—

Thoreau, who recommends sleeping in the box
railroad workers keep their tools in,
would have found this house commodious.

—that contains several cartons of goods left behind by the previous tenant, McNeil; he learns McNeil's story from his landlord, from some letters he finds, and from community gossip.

Probably the most important “character” in the poem is the collective force that acts as antagonist to both these men—the society itself. At first McNeil and his family are welcomed with open arms to the community; he is an ideal citizen,

                    … one of the fathers on Saturday
dashing about. He drove a green Land Rover
as though he were always on safari
with the children and an Irish setter.

An early and very mild conflict involving him helps to define the community. He speaks at a village meeting in favor of “retaining / the Latin teacher at the high school”; despite his arguments, the community votes instead to

                    … remodel the gymnasium.
McNeil accepted defeat gracefully.
That was one of the things they liked about him.

In a summary comment, Simpson speaks ironically for the community, which is able to find a silver lining in this incident:

Contrary to what people say
about the suburbs, they appreciate culture.
Hugh McNeil was an example …
doing the shopping, going to the club,
a man in no way different from themselves,
husband and family man
and good neighbor, who nevertheless spoke Latin.

The passage reflects the “thinking” of Helen Knox, president of the Garden Club and the character whom Simpson uses as spokesperson for Point Mercy. She has a rare ability:

She knew how to put what they were feeling
into words. This was why
she was president—elected not once
or twice … this was her third term in office.

Like her highly cultured community, Helen Knox is anti-Semitic and a racist. Thus, when McNeil begins his adulterous affair with Irene Davis, whose maiden name was the Italian Cristiano, Helen says:

“I met her once” …
“Harry introduced her to me
at the bank. A dark woman. …
I think, a touch of the tar brush.”

Things start to get out of hand—McNeil appears one day with “broken ribs, black eyes, / and a missing tooth,” claiming that he was mugged. A service-station attendant comments:

“He was never mugged.
It was Irene Davis's brothers,
the Cristianos. They had him beat up.”
He knew about gansters. They would beat up a guy
to warn him. The next time it was curtains.

Helen Knox leads a delegation that calls on the chief of staff at the hospital to demand McNeil's dismissal. Dr. Abrahams replies that “McNeil's private life / … / had nothing to do with his work”; “they were fortunate / to have a surgeon of Hugh McNeil's caliber.” Helen Knox sums up the feelings of the entire Garden Club:

“What can you expect?” …
“It was bad enough letting them in,
but to make one chief of staff!”

Eventually, McNeil is divorced and moves into the cottage now occupied by the speaker; he breaks up with Irene, begins seeing her again, breaks up again. Finally he comes back to pick up his things, “accompanied by a young woman / wearing jeans and a sweater”:

It appeared he was back on the track
once more, after his derailment.
With a woman of the right kind at his side
to give him a nudge. “Say thanks!”

It is at this point in the poem that the story of the speaker's own conflict with the society of Point Mercy comes to the fore. He is eating lunch with his friend Maggie at the Colony Inn when he sees Irene Davis for the first time:

They said she was dark. What they hadn't said
was that the darkness, jet-black hair,
was set off by a skin like snow,
like moonlight in a dark field glimmering.

In the final section of the poem, a minor incident causes an argument between the speaker and Maggie. A gazebo has been vandalized, and Maggie defends the youth of Point Mercy: “I'm sure … it wasn't anyone / from around here.” The speaker replies that “You don't have to go into New York City” to find “vandals,” “thieves,” and “illiterates.” His attack on the community convinces Maggie that the speaker is “cynical,” a disease that infects his whole “attitude”:

“Like what you said in the restaurant
about Hugh McNeil and the Davis woman
being better than the rest of us.”

Then she becomes “really angry”:

“I know, you prefer vulgar people.
Anyone who tries to be decent and respectable
is either a hypocrite or a fool.”

Certainly the speaker does hate hypocrisy, but the real basis for this disagreement is his admiration for people who are true to their emotions, whatever the cost in social respectability or status. This is the same attitude that made the speaker of “Summer Morning” “spoil his chances,” for “The thrill of an assignation, / My life that I hold in secret.” In the eyes of society, conformity is more important than self-fulfillment, complimentary fictions more comfortable than the truth about themselves. Thus, despite the affection that he has learned to feel for individuals, the Simpson protagonist still can never have more than an uneasy alliance with American society at large. His sensibility is that of the young poet “Peter,” as defined in the poem of that title originally published in Caviare at the Funeral:

Stupidity reassures you; you do not belong
in a bourgeois establishment, it can never be your home.
Restlessness is a sign of intelligence;
revulsion, the flight of a soul.

(PLH, 169)

At the end of The Best Hour of the Night, Simpson has placed an ars poetica devoted to the plight of the poet who chooses to live and work in suburbia. Entitled “The Unwritten Poem” (BHN, 69), it begins by asking where poetry is to be found; “Not in beautiful faces and distant scenery,” he answers, but:

In your life here, on this street
where the houses from the outside
are all alike, and so are the people.
Inside, the furniture is dreadful—
floc on the walls, and huge color television.

However much he may dislike the details of this way of life, its tastelessness, the absence of emotion, the poet still must also love the people he writes about; as Pound said fifty years ago, unless poetry is based upon affectionate feelings, it will inevitably corrode and die from the inside out. Simpson knows, however, that his feelings will never be reciprocated by the community: “To love and write unrequited / is the poet's fate.” The poem ends with a vision of the soullessness of American life, as the poet watches the morning commuters, “grasping brief-cases,” as they “pass beyond your gaze / and hurl themselves into the flames.” They are like the dead souls of Eliot's “Waste Land,” seen crossing London Bridge every morning. It is, then, finally the soullessness of American life that places the individual in Simpson's poems at odds with this society.

The fugitive-agrarian poets—John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate—used to say that, because the South lost the Civil War, southerners were more in touch with the humble realities of life, with its tragic potentialities, than northerners. It is when he looks at American life as a whole that Simpson finds the emptiness that the earlier poets found in the North. Americans have been too successful, too insulated from want and deprivation.

“The Inner Part,” for example—a one-sentence poem first published in At the End of the Open Road—makes this point in a striking fashion:

When they had won the war
And for the first time in history
Americans were the most important people—
When the leading citizens no longer lived in their shirt sleeves,
And their wives did not scratch in public;
Just when they'd stopped saying “Gosh!”—
When their daughters seemed as sensitive
As the tip of a fly rod,
And their sons were as smooth as a V-8 engine—
Priests, examining the entrails of birds,
Found the heart misplaced, and seeds
As black as death, emitting a strange odor.

(PLH, 72)

It is because of this moral emptiness, this lack of tragic experience, this absence of failure, in America that Simpson turned for the subject matter of many of his poems to Russia, home of his and his mother's ancestors. There he found a people who had suffered, a people who knew the full range of indignities life has to offer those who haven't won every battle.

The poem “Why Do You Write About Russia?” (PLH, 137–40) draws essentially this contrast between the two nations. It begins with the speaker sitting in his suburban American home, remembering how his mother used to tell him, a child in Jamaica, stories about the old country, “of freezing cold,” wolves, and cossacks. The poem is meditative; as he looks out of his window, the speaker contrasts the dreamlike stories he remembers with the life that now surrounds him:

This too is like a dream, the way we live
with our cars and power-mowers …
a life that shuns emotion
and the violence that goes with it,
the object being to live quietly
and bring up children to be happy.

Because it exists in the absence of all other emotions, the speaker feels that such happiness can only be a delusion; this is a crazy way to bring up children. Thus dissatisfied with the life that surrounds him, he asks himself, “What the do I want?”:

A life in which there are depths
beyond happiness. As one of my friends,
Grigoryev, says, “Two things
constantly cry out in creation,
the sea and man's soul.”

Grigoryev is an imaginary friend, whom the speaker has created to tell him stories about the old country, identified later as “the same far place the soul comes from.”

The poem ends with an indirect definition of Russia that indicates what the speaker feels he has inherited from his ancestry:

When I think about Russia
it's not that area of the earth's surface …
… … … … … … … … … … …
It's a sound, such as you hear
in a sea breaking along a shore.
My people came from Russia,
bringing with them nothing
but that sound.

It is that crying out, that longing, that loneliness, that hunger of the unfulfilled soul, that defines the sensibility of the poet and makes poetry what it is.

When pushed to an ultimate extreme, such an intense loneliness of the soul reflects a religious or a spiritual longing, and in the poems of Louis Simpson there is indeed posited a relationship between the poetic sensibility and the religious sensibility. “Baruch” (PLH, 134–36) is one of his best and most characteristic poems; through the stories of two other characters, Russian ancestors of the nineteenth century, it leads up to a central revelation about its speaker, the Simpson character we have been following throughout this chapter. The first section of the poem deals with the title character:

There is an old folk saying:
“He wishes to study the Torah
but he has a wife and family.”
Baruch had a sincere love of learning
but he owned a dress-hat factory.

When the factory burns down one night, Baruch takes this as a sign from God to “give myself to the Word.” He has only begun his studies, however, when death takes him: “For in Israel it is also written, / ‘Prophecy is too great a thing for Baruch.’”

The second section tells of

                    Cousin Deborah
who, they said, had read everything …
The question was, which would she marry,
Tolstoy or Lermontov or Pushkin?

Her family makes the choice and marries her off to a timber merchant from Kiev; when they are locked in the bedroom after the ceremony, she cries and screams all night long:

As soon as it was daylight, Brodsky—
that was his name—drove back to Kiev
like a man pursued.

The third section is reflective and personal; the Simpson protagonist is traveling late at night:

The love of literature goes with us.
On a train approaching midnight
everyone else has climbed into his sarcophagus
except four men playing cards.
There is nothing better than poker—
not for the stakes but the companionship,
trying to outsmart one another.
Taking just one card …
I am sitting next to the window,
looking at the lights on the prairie
clicking by. From time to time
two or three will come together
then go wandering off again.
Then I see a face, pale and unearthly,
that is flitting along with the train,
passing over the fields and rooftops,
and I hear a voice out of the past:
“He wishes to study the Torah.”

All three characters feel the tension that exists between the world of physical reality and the world of the spirit or the imagination. Though he at first thinks otherwise, Baruch belongs in the shadowless world of everyday reality. Cousin Deborah suffers from no such delusion; she exists entirely at the opposite pole. It is left for the Simpson protagonist to live in both worlds at once, to love the physical and to venerate something spiritual at one and the same time.

Louis Simpson is by no means an overtly religious poet; and yet among the poems in the third phase of his career, the phase that locates the poet so firmly in the American suburbs, are several that quest for something spiritual: “I feel that I have two directions I must follow—one leads to this straightforward kind of poem about ordinary life as it really looks and smells, and the other leads to a poetry which is altogether more imagistic and more mysterious” (“Interview with Louis Simpson”).²³ Insofar as this thinking is based upon traditional religious ideas, it grows out of Simpson's studies of Zen Buddhism, about which he has said:

Buddhism teaches that your physical existence and your mental existence are one thing; in the West, we tend automatically to split them apart, as in the Christian idea of the body and the soul. I prefer the medieval idea—they had a term for the body which recognized it as the form for the soul, which I take to mean that the body is the outward garment of the soul. Whitman says that too, that there is no split between the body and the soul. And this is what the Buddhists say also. This way of thinking leads to a poetry that is very physical in its orientation, a poetry that concentrates on ordinary life. (“Interview with Louis Simpson”)²⁴

Simpson's most ambitious poem of a more “mysterious” sort—based very loosely on the ox-herding cartoon series by the Zen master—is “Searching for the Ox” (PLH, 183–87). The poem consists of a “free-floating series of associations,” all of which help express one idea. Section two speaks of those who wish to manipulate the world through an abstract understanding of it—“engineers from IBM,” for example. Their success at sending a rocket towards the moon is very impressive, the speaker says, but

                    … still, I must confess,
I fear those messieurs, like a peasant
listening to the priests talk Latin.
They will send me off to Heaven
when all I want is to live in the world.

Similarly, when he learns the practice of Zen meditation in section five and tries to follow “in the Way / that ‘regards sensory experience as relatively unimportant,’” the speaker finds instead that “I am far more aware / of the present, sensory life.” The poem ends with a central understanding that sends the Simpson protagonist back to where he started:

There is only earth:
in winter laden with snow,
in summer covered with leaves.

Simpson can, at times, sound almost like a mystic when discussing this aspect of his work; the poem “Adam Yankev,” for example, asserts: “Around us / things want to be understood” (PLH, 124)—and in the Afterword to People Live Here, he says: “I have always felt that there is a power and intelligence in things. I felt it as a boy when I watched the sun setting from the top of a mountain and rode a bicycle in the lanes on Kingston and walked along the shore, listening to the sea. I felt that power when I first saw Manhattan rise out of the Atlantic, the towers a poet describes as ‘moody water-loving giants.’”²⁵

However, just as he is probably the most consciously American of the poets treated in this book, Simpson is also the most pragmatic of them. Simpson's orientation, even at its most religious, is not other-worldly; for him, the ultimate meaning of the world, of the earth, is to be found in “the things of this world” themselves and not in abstract ideas about them. In the poem “The Foggy Lane” (PLH, 182), Simpson's speaker encounters in succession three abstractionists: the first extols poets who deal only in a world of dreams; the second is a radical who wants “to live in a pure world”; the third is a salesman who thinks an insurance policy can protect one from harm. In the final stanza, the speaker replies to them all:

Walking in the foggy lane
I try to keep my attention fixed
on the uneven, muddy surface …
the pools made by the rain,
and wheel-ruts, and wet leaves,
and the rustling of small animals.

What we see here is not just a theory of poetry but a philosophy of how the world should be understood and dealt with; it is real, it is uncertain, it is beautiful, and it deserves our complete attention.

Notes

1. The theme of the individual's sense of alienation from society has been noticed by other of Simpson's critics. C. B. Cox, for example, writes: “Always something of an alien, his criticisms reflect personal dissatisfaction because he can never completely associate his own cosmopolitan literary inheritance with the brash and expansive landscapes of America. For him, the real search is not for new lands, but for one's true identity and the meaning of one's death” (“The Poetry of Louis Simpson,” Critical Quarterly 8 [1966]: 77). Karl Malkoff has expressed much the same notion using slightly different terms: “Simpson has reconstructed the romantic myth of the conflict between innocence and experience, between the infinite possibilities of childhood and the narrow confines of adulthood, between romantic optimism and existential despair” (Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973], p. 297).

2. Louis Simpson, North of Jamaica (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 199.

3. Simpson, “As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs,” in People Live Here: Selected Poems, 1949–1983 (Brockport, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1983), p. 14. Subsequent quotations from this volume will be documented parenthetically within the text, using the abbreviation PLH. The other abbreviation that will be used is BHN, for Simpson's The Best Hour of the Night (New Haven and New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983).

4. Many critics have commented on the change in Simpson's style. In fact, as early as 1958, before the change had occurred, Robert Bly was already calling for it: “the spectre appears of a war between content and form, with the form acting so as to render the content innocuous, or as a sort of protective camouflage to conceal exactly how revolutionary the content is. … he should avoid his fault, which is a tendency in form to do what has already been done. He should search for a form as fresh as his content” (“The Work of Louis Simpson,” The Fifties, no. 1 [1958]: 25). As for the change itself, Ronald Moran (in the only full-length critical study yet devoted to Simpson's work) ascribed it to Simpson's 1959 “move to California [that] marked the beginning of a significant stylistic change in which the conventions gave way to the freedom inherent in colloquial expression and in meterless lines” (Louis Simpson [New York: Twayne, 1972], p. 59). While William H. Roberson has taken note of the connection between the change in style and an increase in personal subject matter—“The increased flexibility of the poetry also marked a movement away from the impersonal toward a more personal quality” (Louis Simpson: A Reference Guide [Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980], p. x)—Richard Howard has explained the connection more fully: “At the End of the Open Road appeared to jettison all the scrimshaw-work which had been such a typical and such a reassuring aspect of Simpson's verse. … The poet [came to rely] more on personality, his own awareness of his voice … as a mortar to hold his lines together, dispensing him from certain evidences, certain cartilages in his text” (Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 [New York: Atheneum, 1969], pp. 465–66). The new style itself has been accurately characterized by Duane Locke: “In Open Road, the style loosens, the lines become uneven, and the movement of the natural voice and phrasal breaks replace [sic] 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” (“New Directions in Poetry,” dust I [1964]: 68–69).

5. Simpson, “Capturing the World as It Is: An Interview with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly,” in his A Company of Poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 225.

6. Simpson, A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 169–70. That the created Simpson protagonist has an inevitably subjective basis is made clear by Yohma Gray, who wrote in 1963 that Simpson's “point of view is more subjective than objective; the reader is aware of the intrusion of the poet's private, inner life in the poems rather than the insertion of an invented character from whom the poet is detached. He does not demonstrate what Keats called ‘negative capability,’ or what has been more recently called aesthetic distance. Although he sometimes writes in the third person, the reader senses a subjective ‘I’ in the poem” (“The Poetry of Louis Simpson,” in Poets in Progress, ed. Edward Hungerford [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967], p. 229).

7. Several critics have noticed Simpson's preoccupation with an American subject matter. Writing in 1965, James Dickey commented: “His Selected Poems shows Louis Simpson working, at first tentatively and then with increasing conviction, toward his own version of a national, an American poetry. … He demonstrates that the best service an American poet can do his country is to see it all: not just the promise, not just the loss and the ‘betrayal of the American ideal,’ the Whitmanian ideal—although nobody sees this last more penetratingly than Simpson does—but the whole ‘complex fate,’ the difficult and agonizing meaning of being an American, of living as an American at the time in which one chances to live” (From Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968], pp. 195–96).

8. Simpson, “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain,” in A Company of Poets, p. 34.

9. James Wright, “The Delicacy of Walt Whitman,” in Collected Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 19.

10. Simpson, “Rolling Up,” in A Company of Poets, p. 314.

11. Another opinion on this poem (one with which I obviously disagree) is expressed by Ronald Moran: “The last line, ‘My life that I hold in secret,’ is actually a lament for the speaker's inability to feel—for his inability now to become involved with any degree of commitment with a woman” (Louis Simpson, p. 104). This interpretation is repeated almost verbatim in a book that Moran later wrote with George S. Lensing: “‘Summer Morning' … ends with the line, ‘My life that I hold in secret.’ This is the speaker's lament for his own inability to feel any degree of commitment with a woman now” (Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976], p. 157).

12. Simpson, “Dogface Poetics,” in A Company of Poets, p. 17.

13. It is interesting that Robert Bly should have pointed out, as early as 1958, this same quality in Simpson's early poems: “The poet's strength is great love of humanity …” (“The Work of Louis Simpson,” p. 25). Early reviewers were more likely to see Simpson as misanthropic than humane.

14. Speaking specifically of the poems in Searching for the Ox (1976), Dave Smith noted that Simpson “has come to a certain unfashionable narrative base, to a poetry that unabashedly employs the devices of prose fiction” (“A Child of the World,” American Poetry Review 8, no. 1 [1979]: 11).

15. Simpson, “Rolling Up,” p. 316.

16. Simpson, Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1975), p. 35.

17. Simpson, “Lowell's Indissoluble Bride,” in A Company of Poets, p. 199.

18. Simpson, “To the Jewish Book Council” (unpublished address: May 3, 1981), ms. p. 3.

19. Simpson, “Rolling Up,” p. 316.

20. On the role of personality in Simpson's poems, Dave Smith has commented: “Like Whitman, he contains many selves who go adventuring within the letter I” (“A Child of the World,” p. 12).

21. Indeed, a common reaction to much of Simpson's poetry has been that it is satirical. Certainly there is a bitter edge to many of the anti-America poems of phase two; however, as Robert Bly pointed out in the passage quoted above, in general it is Simpson's humanistic impulse that is dominant. Thus, when Karl Malkoff writes, of “Hot Night on Water Street,” that “It is a satire of small-town America” (Crowell's Handbook, p. 295), it seems to me that he is wrong. The poem instead intends to present the feelings of loneliness experienced by its speaker.

22. Nikki Stiller, “Shopping for Identity: Louis Simpson's Poetry,” Midstream, December 1976, p. 66.

23. Writing in 1966, C. B. Cox was already able to see Simpson moving towards mystery: “In his most recent work his rhythms have become more free, less tied to iambic norms, and he makes increasing use of mysterious imagery whose total effect is beyond rational appraisal” (“The Poetry of Louis Simpson,” p. 83).

24. The best critical discussion of the spiritual dimension in Simpson's recent work is that by Dave Smith in American Poetry Review, where he suggests: “Simpson, I believe, would argue that there is no division between inner and outer life except for those who have gone ‘astray’ and that what poetry must do is find a direct and clear way of making this life, its Oneness, fully visible as it was in whatever tropics we came from” (“A Child of the World,” p. 14).

25. Simpson, “The Sound of Words for Their Own Sake—an Afterword,” in People Live Here, p. 203.