At the End of the Open Road
by Louis Simpson
Summary
At the End of the Open Road takes its title, and its argument, from Walt Whitman's open road, the confident vision of American possibility Whitman's poetry helped invent, and Louis Simpson spends the book testing that vision against the country he actually found in postwar suburbs, highways, and Cold War prosperity.
Simpson had fought with the 101st Airborne Division through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, including the brutal fighting at Carentan and the siege at Bastogne, and the book carries that combat experience into its skepticism about any easy national self image. Written in a spare free verse that marks his break from the more formal poems of his earlier books, it moves between surreal vignette and flat, ironic narrative, watching suburban comfort and highway sprawl with the eye of someone who had already seen what the same country asked of its soldiers a few years before. The critic Edward Hirsch called it a sustained meditation on the American character, one that shows the country "not as we wish to be but as we are," and Simpson brings an outsider's edge to that meditation: born in Jamaica to a father of Scottish and African descent and a Russian Jewish mother, he did not take the American Dream as a birthright the way a native born poet might.
Reading the book means following short, often ironic poems that undercut their own hopeful openings, moving quickly and coolly rather than building toward consolation. It suits a reader interested in poetry that argues directly with Whitman's legacy, testing the promise of the open road against the disquiet Simpson found waiting at its end.
Historical Context & Significance
At the End of the Open Road won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, recognizing a poet who had left formal verse behind for a looser, more skeptical American voice.
Simpson emigrated to the United States at seventeen to study at Columbia University, where Mark Van Doren became an early teacher, and after wartime service he returned to complete his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. there before teaching at Columbia, the University of California, Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he remained based for the rest of his career. He continued writing and teaching for decades afterward, and his early experience as an immigrant watching American life from a slight distance remained part of how critics read the skepticism this book first stated in full. He died in Stony Brook, New York, in 2012.