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).


 

 



Simpson served with a glider-infantry regiment of the 101st Airborne Division in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. In combat he was a runner. He carried messages. In Holland he was wounded by a shell, and at Bastogne his feet were frost-bitten; but he survived. After the War, however, he had a nervous breakdown and was taken into hospital suffering from amnesia. The War was blacked out in his mind, as were episodes in his life before the War. When he was discharged from hospital, he found that he could hardly read or write. In a contributor's note to an anthology, Simpson say:

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.


—Jon Stallworthy, "The Fury and the Mire," The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: OUP, 2007): 566–67.



 

 

Study Questions

  • In what way are the descriptions of the soldiers throughout the poem similar or different from the simile in line 5?



            

 

 

 




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>

 


        



 


 

Reference

 

 

Links Poem Texts
  • "The Battle," The Owner of the House: New and Collected Poems, 1940–2001 (2003)
Criticism
World War II

 


Media

  • Louis Simpson Reading Five War Poems (6:58 min.; "The Battle" is from beginning to 1:07)




  • The Battle of the Bulge, Battlefield Detectives (2005; 44:53 min.)

 


Louis Simpson

 

 

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.

Simpson, Louis. Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965. Print.









 


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Last updated October 14, 2015