Department of English
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
The Battle
(1955)
Louis
Simpson
(March 27, 1923 – September 18, 2012)
Notes
This poem was
first collected in Good News of Death
and Other Poems (1955).
Before the war I had written a few poems and some prose. Now I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. Through poems, I could release [end of page 566] the irrational, grotesque images I had accumulated during the war; and imposing order on those images enabled me to recover my identity. In 1948, when I was living in Paris, one night I dreamed that I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine-gun and mortar fire. The next morning I wrote it out in the poem 'Carentan O Carentan', and as I wrote I realized that it wasn't a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire.
Study Questions
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Sample Student Responses to Simpson's "The Battle"
Response 1:
Student Name 2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri August 31, 2012 Reading Response 3
Title Text. Text.
Works Cited Book Article |
Response 2:
Rawida Komkai 2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri September 6, 2011 Reading Response 3
Title <Text of
reading response>
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Reference
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Louis Simpson |
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Reference
Simpson, Louis. "The Battle." The Owner of the House: New and Collected Poems, 1940–2001. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2003. 114. American Poets Continuum 78.
Further Reading
Simpson, Louis. At the end of the Open Road: Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1963. Print.
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Last
updated October 14, 2015