Historical Context
R. W. Flint recalls a moment when Simpson remarked to an interviewer that "[i]t’s the timidity of suburban life that is so limiting." Yet, with timidity cast aside, Simpson emerged as a champion of the middle class, elevating ordinary characters in his poetry to near-heroic status. His verses tell of individuals who shop, engage in small talk, navigate the daily grind, and escape to sunlit vacations—portraying a world Simpson intimately understands. While contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg were crafting boisterous, surreal poems that condemned the conformity of suburban mid-century America, Simpson was meticulously weaving poems rich in subtlety and humor. During the same period that Simpson penned the works in At the End of the Open Road, the United States was experiencing a vigorous post-war economic boom.
In the late 1940s, waves of returning World War II veterans surged across the nation, fueling a burgeoning demand for affordable homes. These veterans yearned for their own piece of land and a freshly built house. Visionaries like William J. Levitt seized this opportunity, using cost-effective materials to transform the outskirts of major cities from rural farmland into expansive housing communities. Levitt cleverly included the cost of elementary schools in the housing price, fostering genuine community spirit. Spanning fifteen hundred acres of Long Island potato fields, the inaugural Levittown became an archetype for the thousands of suburban developments sprouting up across the 1950s and 1960s. This uniformity cemented the notion of suburbia as a place of sameness and blandness, seemingly stripped of the vibrant cultural tapestry and diversity found in bustling metropolises.
Suburbia also came to epitomize a certain conservative worldview. As cities grappled with poverty, crime, congestion, and increasing turmoil, throngs sought refuge in the suburbs, yearning for tranquility and safety. This migration, predominantly by Caucasians, was labeled "white flight" by historians and critics. Television programs of the era, such as Ozzie and Harriet, Dennis the Menace, and later, The Brady Bunch, reflected and reinforced the mainstream, middle-class values synonymous with suburban life.
In stark contrast, America's cities in the early 1960s were becoming hotbeds of change. In 1960, the nation saw Democratic leader John F. Kennedy narrowly secure the presidency. Initially hesitant—despite having garnered over 70 percent of the Black vote—Kennedy's administration soon advanced civil rights, establishing the Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity in 1961 and dismantling segregation in interstate transit and government-backed housing that same year. By 1963, Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council launched a relentless campaign against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Their sit-ins and marches rattled the city's white power structures, and police chief "Bull" Connor unwittingly rallied the movement by deploying police dogs, fire hoses, and officers against the peaceful protestors. In a historic moment of unity, a quarter-million people marched on Washington D.C. in August 1963, pressing Congress to pass Kennedy’s civil rights legislation and to listen as King delivered his immortal "I Have a Dream" speech.
Style and Technique
Analogy
“In the Suburbs” offers a poignant analogy, likening the lives of the middle class to a form of unthinking allegiance. While analogies, much like similes, often employ “as” or “like,” they tend to delve deeper, expanding the scope of comparison. They frequently strive to illuminate the intangible through the lens of the tangible. Here, the concept of the middle class serves as the abstraction, while the vivid imagery of people serenely marching to a temple, their voices raised in song, provides the concrete anchor.
Tone
The poem exudes a tone that is simultaneously accusatory and tinged with despair. The speaker's use of the second person “you” underscores the accusatory aspect,...
(This entire section contains 177 words.)
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while his relentless assertion that nothing can change evokes a sense of hopelessness, suggesting that existing within the middle class is merely a contemporary form of self-entrapment. Beneath this tone lies the final stanza's imagery, which Simpson critic Ronald Moran might describe as belonging to the "emotive imagination." According to Moran, this kind of imagery delivers “a muted shock effect,” subtly unsettling the reader's preconceived notions.
Compare and Contrast
1963: The United States finds itself grappling with an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent.
Today: Following a decade of robust economic growth, unemployment in the United States has dwindled to a mere 4.1 percent.
1961: In the tapestry of American family life, 87.5 percent represent married couple households, while 10 percent are led by women.
Today: The landscape has shifted, with married couple families comprising 79.2 percent, and female-headed families rising to 16.5 percent.
1967: In his seminal work The Medium Is the Message, visionary writer Marshall McLuhan introduces the concept of the Global Village, suggesting that innovations in transportation and communication have seemingly erased the barriers of time and space, allowing people to interact as if they resided in the same "village."
Today: The World Wide Web intensifies this collapse of time and space, granting people across the globe—especially in economically advanced nations—instantaneous, widespread, and affordable communication.
Adaptations
In 1985, Watershed Tapes unveiled an audiocassette masterpiece, Physical Universe, featuring the evocative voice of Simpson reciting his poetic creations. These tapes, echoing brilliance, are available through Inland Book Company, nestled at P.O. Box 120261, East Haven, CT 06512.
Two years earlier, in a moment of auditory magic, New Letters on the Air produced an audiocassette of Simpson's poetic renditions, broadcast on the esteemed National Public Radio. For those wishing to capture this auditory journey, reach out to New Letters at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, 5100 Rockhill Rd., Kansas City, MO 64110.
The year 2001 saw the debut of Wonderland, a documentary by the visionary director John O’Hagan. This film delves into the post-war aspirations embodied by Levittown, Long Island, examining how the 1950s suburban boom symbolized the baby boomers' pursuit of idyllic middle-class life.
Bibliography
Sources
Bradley, Sculley, and Harold W. Blodgett, eds., Walt Whitman: “Leaves of Grass,” Norton, 1973.
Dickey, James, Review of Selected Poems, in American Scholar, Vol. 34, Autumn 1965, p. 650.
Ellman, Richard, and Robert O’Clair, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd ed., Norton, 1983.
Flint, R. W., “Child of This World,” in Parnassus, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall/Winter 1983–Spring/Summer 1984, pp. 302–17.
Gans, Herbert, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Hirsche, Edward, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Harcourt, 1999, pp. 4–5.
Horowitz, David A., Peter N. Carroll, and David D. Lee, eds., On the Edge: A New History of Twentieth-Century America, West Publishing Company, 1990.
Howard, Richard, Alone with America, Atheneum, 1961, pp. 451–70.
Hungerford, Edward, ed., Poets in Progress: Critical Prefaces to Thirteen Modern American Poets, Northwestern University Press, 1967.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change, Iowa State University Press, 1980.
Lazer, Hank, ed., On Louis Simpson: Depths beyond Happiness, University of Michigan Press, 1988.
Moran, Ronald, Louis Simpson, Twayne, 1972.
—, Review, in Southern Review, Spring 1965, pp. 475–77.
Rosenthal, M. L., The New Poets: American & British Poetry since World War II, Oxford, 1967, pp. 323–24.
Simpson, Louis, The End of the Open Road, Wesleyan University Press, 1960.
—, North of Jamaica, Harper, 1972.
—, Ships Going into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Stitt, Peter, The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets, University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Wright, James, Above the River: The Complete Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Further Reading
Baxandall, Rosalyn Fraad, and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, Basic Books, 2000. The authors, academics who commute from Manhattan to Old Westbury, Long Island, explore the stereotypes of suburban life, concluding that it is not the cultural wasteland or place of privilege that others have often described.
Lensing, George S., and Ronald Moran, Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford, Louisiana State University Press, 1976, 2000. Moran and Lensing argue that these poets constitute a school of poetry in that their work is defined by what they call the “emotive imagination.” Their poetry relies on associative leaps of logic and is linked to deep image poetry.
Simpson, Louis, The King My Father’s Wreck, Story Line Press, 1995. Simpson’s memoir recounts the poet’s childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, his expectations in coming to America, and the reality of living in the United States.
Stepanchev, Stephen, American Poetry since 1945, Harper, 1965. Stepanchev’s literary history is a highly readable account of the aesthetic and ideological movements in American poetry after World War II.
