The Poetry of Charles Simic: Simplicity Sings Booker Smith College

Charles Simic’s poetry specializes in illustrating the profound within the mundane. Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938 (Ford). He is of Serbian descent. Naturally, his early life was dominated by the Nazi period. While of much Simic’s work derives from this time (Ford), he often explores the legacies of such a totalizing war on Western society and culture. Simic’s father fled Yugoslavia in 1944, and did not reunite with his family until a decade later in 1954 in the United States (Ford). In the U.S., Simic worked a series of odd jobs until joining the Army in 1961, returning to Europe as a military policeman in Germany and France (Ford). After some time in New York, he accepted a professorship in 1973 from the University of New Hampshire, where he has since remained (Ford).

Simic’s poetry is an exegesis of his time. His work encompasses both the tragedy of war and the monotony of modern life. There are underlying currents of conflict in Simic’s work. Tension arises between Europe and America, the profound and the mundane, and the deep, but perhaps fleeting, legacy of wartime Europe on Western life. Simic’s work is best understood as balancing these apparent contradictions in a candid and illuminating manner. Simic’s...