Ed was in love with a cocktail waitress,
but Ed’s family, and his friends,
didn’t approve. So he broke it off.
He married a respectable woman
who played the piano. She played well enough
to have been a professional.
Ed’s wife left him …
Years later, at a family gathering
Ed got drunk and made a fool of himself.
He said, “I should have married Doreen.”
“Well,” they said, “why didn’t you?”
Simpson
was born in Jamaica, the son of Rosalind (née Marantz) and Aston Simpson, a
lawyer. His father was of Scottish and African ancestry. His mother was born in
Russia (Simpson did not find out that he was Jewish until his teenage years).
At
the age of 17, he emigrated to the United States and began attending Columbia
University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren.
During
World War II, from 1943 to 1945 he was a member of the elite 101st Airborne
Division and would fight in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
Louis was a runner for the company captain, which involved transporting orders
from company headquarters to officers on the front line. His company was
involved in a very bloody battle with German forces on the west bank of what is
now the Carentan France Marina - Simpson wrote his poem "Carentan"
about the experience of US troops being ambushed there. In the Netherlands, he
was involved in Market Garden and Opheusden fighting. At Veghel his company
suffered 21 killed in a brutal shelling while in the local church yard. At
Bastogne bitterly cold temperatures had to be endured while the 101st Division
was surrounded by enemy forces for days.
After
the end of the war he attended the University of Paris.
Subsequently,
he returned to the US and worked as an editor in New York. He later completed
his B.A. at Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1948, and
completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1950 and 1959,
respectively.
Simpson’s
lifelong expatriate status has influenced his poetry, and he often uses the
lives of ordinary Americans in order to critically investigate the myths the
country tells itself. Although he occasionally revisits the West Indies of his
childhood, he always keeps one foot in his adopted country.
The
outsider's perspective allows him to confront "the terror and beauty of
life with a wry sense of humor and a mysterious sense of fate," wrote
Edward Hirsch of the Washington Post. Elsewhere Hirsch described Simpson’s
Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, At the End of the Open Road, as "a
sustained meditation on the American character," noting, "The moral
genius of this book is that it traverses the open road of American mythology
and brings us back to ourselves; it sees us not as we wish to be but as we
are." Collected Poems (1988) and There You Are (1995) focus on the lives
of everyday citizens, using simple diction and narratives to expose the
bewildering reality of the American dream. Poet Mark Jarman hailed Simpson as
"a poet of the American character and vernacular."
Simpson
lived on the north shore of Long Island, near Stony Brook. He died on September
14, 2012.