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dan1066's review
4.0
Every night, at the end of America
We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.
How sad it is, the end of America!
While we were waiting for the land
They’d finished it—with gas drums
On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys
Where lives are mean and wretched.
But the banks thrive and the realtors
Rejoice—they have their America.
Still, there is something unsettled in the air,
Out there on the Pacific
There’s no America but the Marines.
Whitman was wrong about the People,
But right about himself. The land is within.
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.
”Lines Written Near San Francisco
These lines from the concluding poem in Louis Simpson’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1963 collection At the End of the Open Road are emblematic of the style and substance of all the poems. Simpson laments the idealism and hope in Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” has ended, that “the People” choose not to interact with the poetic process, that big business has gutted the American dream and tossed the entrails into the ocean.
Simpson, however, manages to elevate his material above maudlin, self-pitying poems—barely. There’s a few poems where he uses imagery of muses or symbols from Russian literature or even T.S. Eliot as an “embalmer” looking over a fence to make his point—and they’re strained, unsuccessful exercises. However some poems focus on Simpson’s unease with the eroding of the poetic soul, and while he could adopt the “we just don’t write them like we used to anymore” stance, he doesn’t. As the statue of Whitman notes in “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain”:
“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet, did I not warn you that it was Myself
I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?
“I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
For me, this is how to approach this collection—these are the “moods” of a poet lamenting the current cultural state of his nation. They are neither “prescriptions” nor “prophecies. Simpson is not clanging a bell wearing a sandwich board warning we will perish after meaningless lives unless we nourish our parched souls with poetry--though he skirts dangerously close to that stance at times. No, there’s something deeper going on at the end of our road—something poets, our nations, and ourselves need to wrestle with. When he isn't lamenting loss, Simpson places a reassuring yet firm hand on our shoulders and entreats us to contemplate the darkness between the stars. And, in the end, doing so is good for our souls.
We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.
How sad it is, the end of America!
While we were waiting for the land
They’d finished it—with gas drums
On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys
Where lives are mean and wretched.
But the banks thrive and the realtors
Rejoice—they have their America.
Still, there is something unsettled in the air,
Out there on the Pacific
There’s no America but the Marines.
Whitman was wrong about the People,
But right about himself. The land is within.
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.
”Lines Written Near San Francisco
These lines from the concluding poem in Louis Simpson’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1963 collection At the End of the Open Road are emblematic of the style and substance of all the poems. Simpson laments the idealism and hope in Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” has ended, that “the People” choose not to interact with the poetic process, that big business has gutted the American dream and tossed the entrails into the ocean.
Simpson, however, manages to elevate his material above maudlin, self-pitying poems—barely. There’s a few poems where he uses imagery of muses or symbols from Russian literature or even T.S. Eliot as an “embalmer” looking over a fence to make his point—and they’re strained, unsuccessful exercises. However some poems focus on Simpson’s unease with the eroding of the poetic soul, and while he could adopt the “we just don’t write them like we used to anymore” stance, he doesn’t. As the statue of Whitman notes in “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain”:
“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet, did I not warn you that it was Myself
I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?
“I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
For me, this is how to approach this collection—these are the “moods” of a poet lamenting the current cultural state of his nation. They are neither “prescriptions” nor “prophecies. Simpson is not clanging a bell wearing a sandwich board warning we will perish after meaningless lives unless we nourish our parched souls with poetry--though he skirts dangerously close to that stance at times. No, there’s something deeper going on at the end of our road—something poets, our nations, and ourselves need to wrestle with. When he isn't lamenting loss, Simpson places a reassuring yet firm hand on our shoulders and entreats us to contemplate the darkness between the stars. And, in the end, doing so is good for our souls.
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