Eileen Simpson

Eileen Simpson (1918 – October 21, 2002) was an American writer and psychotherapist. Her 1982 book Poets in their Youth records her life with first husband John Berryman and his circle of poets, including Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. In 1984 she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in General Nonfiction.

In 1960, Eileen married Robert Simpson, a banker and diplomat, and relocated to Paris. Unable to continue her psychotherapist practice, she turned to writing, publishing a novel and two personal memoirs as well as studies in psychology. After the death of her second husband, she married Francis X. Baine, who died in the late 1990s.

Simpson left Berryman in 1953, divorcing officially in 1956. Berryman would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for "The Dream Songs" in 1965, and eventually committed suicide in 1972. Simpson's memoir was published in 1982 by Random House, and reissued in 2014 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The title is taken from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence":

Simpson met Berryman at a New Year's party in New York in 1941, soon after her graduation from Hunter College, and they were married the following year at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The couple moved to Beacon Hill, and Berryman found work lecturing at Harvard, and later Princeton. Berryman, like other poets of his generation, would continue to earn his living through academic postings. Simpson meanwhile supported his poetry practice first with secretarial positions, and later, as a psychology student, with work at a Princeton clinic.