Educated at Munro College (Jamaica, West Indies) and at Columbia where he received his doctorate, Louis Simpson has taught at various universities. The author of seventeen books of poetry, he has received the Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Hudson Review Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and the Pulitzer Prize.
From BooklistSimpson is one of the most memorable contributors
to the outstanding Poets of World War II [BKL Mr 15 03].
His war experiences in the infantry in Europe were hairier than
those of most American soldier-poets, who flew or served away from
the front. The war preoccupies his early work, which includes most
of his most impressive poems. Those, regular in rhyme and meter,
often achieve their edgy power by balancing grim content against
the plucky mood of their jingly rhythms. After the war, Simpson
became a literature professor without forsaking his public voice
and concerns. Switching to unrhymed, even-lined verse, he wrote of
gray comforts and desperate strivings (often just so much adultery)
in the suburbs; of travel and travel observations; and of his
Russian Jewish heritage, which somehow led to his own upbringing in
Jamaica while too many relatives went to Auschwitz. Read
chronologically, his poems constitute the record of a finely
intelligent and democratic man's journey from heroism to warm,
common citizenship--a life one can envy. Ray Olson
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