Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro was an influential American poet born in Baltimore, Maryland, whose literary career began in the early 20th century. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II in the South Pacific, during which time his fiancé published two of his poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning *V-Letter, and Other Poems*. After the war, Shapiro held prominent roles as a poetry consultant at the Library of Congress and as an educator at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Davis. His poetry is noted for its immediacy and traditionalist influences, often reflecting on personal and sociopolitical themes. Shapiro's early works were characterized by their emotional depth, particularly his war poems, while his later writings explored a more personal style and critiqued contemporary poetic forms. He published notable collections such as *Person, Place, and Thing* and *The Bourgeois Poet*, and his prose includes autobiographical works that delve into his experiences and the literary landscape. Shapiro passed away in New York City in 2000, leaving behind a legacy that continued to resonate through the posthumous publication of his unreleased poems in *Coda: Last Poems* in 2008.
Subject Terms
Karl Shapiro
Poet
- Born: November 10, 1913
- Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
- Died: May 14, 2000
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Karl Jay Shapiro was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University, and Enoch Pratt Library School. In World War II, he served in the US Army for three years in the South Pacific. During this absence from the United States, his fiancé, Evelyn Katz, saw two of his books through the presses, including V-Letter, and Other Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1945. In 1946 and 1947, he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress; for the next three years, he taught as a professor of writing at Johns Hopkins. From 1950 until 1956, he edited Poetry magazine in Chicago; he then went to the University of Nebraska and edited Prairie Schooner until 1968, when he joined the English faculty of the University of California at Davis.
Shapiro’s early poetry established him firmly among the best poets of his generation. Person, Place, and Thing contains such familiar poems as “Haircut” and “Auto Wreck”; “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” and “The Leg” appeared in V-Letter, and Other Poems. Poems in these volumes are characterized by an immediacy of experience and an indebtedness to traditionalist poetry. Having written some of the best war poems of the decade, Shapiro found himself out of the army and in the midst of the literary “establishment”; despite the success of his earlier work, Shapiro seemed to doubt the significance of the “established” tradition. Consequently, in his essays, he attacked the lack of newness in the poetry of his contemporaries and embraced the “open” prosodies of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Convinced that emotion or feeling should take precedence over traditional form, Shapiro began to explore the broader applications of the Whitman tradition.
Some of these explorations, such as In Defense of Ignorance and The Bourgeois Poet, constitute extreme reactions against the intellectual tradition fostered by T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden; others, like Poems of a Jew, are attempts to establish a positive state of sociopolitical consciousness from which to speak.
Later, as in The White-Haired Lover and The Old Horsefly, Shapiro’s poetry became more personal and reflective. Most significant to Shapiro’s later work, however, is neither poetry nor criticism. The Younger Son and Reports of My Death are candid, third-person autobiographies that examine the poet’s involvement in World War II, his years as editor of Poetry, and controversies involving Ezra Pound and the editing of Prairie Schooner. While his most memorable poems are perhaps the war poems of V-Letter, and Other Poems, the prose poetry of The Bourgeois Poet and the exacting essays of The Poetry Wreck account also for the greatness and diversity of Shapiro’s work.
Shapiro died at the age of eighty-six on May 14, 2000, in New York City. Two years after his death, his wife found several unpublished poems in a desk drawer. These poems were eventually published together in essentially the state in which they were found in the posthumous collection Coda: Last Poems (2008).
Author Works
Poetry:
Poems, 1935
Person, Place, and Thing, 1942
The Place of Love, 1942
V-Letter, and Other Poems, 1944
Trial of a Poet, and Other Poems, 1947
Poems, 1942–1953, 1953
Poems of a Jew, 1958
The Bourgeois Poet, 1964
The White-Haired Lover, 1968
Selected Poems, 1968
Adult Bookstore, 1976
Collected Poems, 1940–1978, 1978
Love and War, Art and God, 1984
Adam and Eve, 1986
New and Selected Poems, 1940–1986, 1987
The Old Horsefly, 1992
The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, 1998 (Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow, editors)
Coda: Last Poems, 2008 (Robert Phillips, editor)
Long Fiction:
Edsel, 1971
Drama:
The Tenor, pr. 1952 (libretto)
The Soldier’s Tale, pr. 1968 (libretto)
Nonfiction:
Essay on Rime, 1945
English Prosody and Modern Poetry, 1947
A Bibliography of Modern Prosody, 1948
Beyond Criticism, 1953
In Defense of Ignorance, 1960
Start with the Sun: Studies in Cosmic Poetry, 1960 (with James E. Miller, Jr., and Bernice Slote)
Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, 1962
A Prosody Handbook, 1965 (with Robert Beum)
To Abolish Children, and Other Essays, 1968
The Poetry Wreck: Selected Essays, 1950–1970, 1975
The Younger Son, 1988
Reports of My Death, 1990
Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts, 1988–90 (includes The Younger Son and Reports of My Death)
Edited Texts:
Poets at Work, 1948 (with W. H. Auden)
The Writer’s Experience, 1964 (with Ralph Ellison)
Bibliography
Bartlett, Lee. Karl Shapiro: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1933–1937. New York: Garden, 1979. A bibliographic record of Shapiro’s work up to 1977. Includes articles and poems in periodicals, translations of his works, and contributions to anthologies.
Engels, Tim. “Shapiro’s ‘The Fly.’” Explicator 55, no. 1 (1991): 41–43. A close reading of one of Shapiro’s better-known poems.
Oostdijl, Diederick. “‘Someplace Called Poetry’: Karl Shapiro, Poetry Magazine, and Postwar American Poetry.” English Studies 81 (August, 2000): 346–357. Reviews Shapiro’s influence and accomplishments as editor of Poetry.
Reino, Joseph. Karl Shapiro. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Although dated, this overview study offers biographical information, critical assessment, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Richman, Robert. “The Trials of a Poet.” The New Centurion 6 (April, 1988): 74–81. This review of Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems, 1940–1986 provides quick observations of a number of poems, as well as a commentary on development and theme. Richman also pulls from Shapiro’s nonpoetic writing for elaboration.
Shapiro, Karl. “Poetry and Family: An Interview with Karl Shapiro.” Interview by Andrea Gale Hammer. Prairie Schooner 55 (Fall, 1981): 3–31. A long, very personal, and intriguing interview with the poet, interesting for the insight it sheds on the man and his thought. An excellent portrait of Shapiro.
Shapiro, Karl, and Ralph Ellison. The Writer’s Experience. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1964. Included in this pamphlet is an essay by Shapiro entitled “American Poet?” that is autobiographical in part. Shapiro shares a retrospective of his career and his personal struggles and mentions his influences and colleagues. He also comments on the state of poetry in America and around the world. An excellent and revealing essay.