Simpson, Louis

▪ American poet

born March 27, 1923, Jamaica

      Jamaican-born U.S. poet and critic, notable for his marked development in poetic style. In 1964 he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his volume At The End of the Open Road, Poems (1963).

      Simpson moved from Jamaica to New York City at age 17. His education at Columbia University in New York City was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army (1943–45), and he was graduated from Columbia in 1948 (Ph.D., 1959). During the 1950s he worked as a book editor and taught at Columbia and at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1967 he taught at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.

      Simpson's early poetry—that of The Arrivistes: Poems 1940–1949 (1949) and Good News of Death and Other Poems (1955)—follows traditional forms and conventional rhyme and metrical patterns, though it treats such contemporary themes as war and the quality of life in the 20th century. In A Dream of Governors (1959), however, Simpson began to reflect the influence of Walt Whitman's poetry and to experiment with free verse. Simpson came to believe that poetry springs from the inner life of the poet and that its expression should be original and natural. By the publication of his next book of poetry, At the End of the Open Road, Poems, the development of his poetic style was clear: the use of poetic conventions had been abandoned. Simpson's later collections of poetry include Adventures of the Letter I (1971), Searching for the Ox (1976), Caviare at the Funeral (1980), and The Best Hour of the Night (1983). In addition to writing poetry, Simpson produced several critical studies of other poets and an autobiography, North of Jamaica (1972; U.K. title Air with Armed Men). A collection of his essays and lectures, A Company of Poets, was published in 1981.

* * *