The Poetry of Shapiro by Karl Shapiro

First published:Person, Place and Thing, 1942; V-Letter and Other Poems, 1944; Essay on Rime, 1945; Trial of a Poet and Other Poems, 1947; Poems, 1940-1953, 1953; Poems of a Jew, 1958; The Bourgeois Poet, 1964

Critical Evaluation:

When Karl Shapiro published his first two volumes of poetry, PERSON, PLACE AND THING and V-LETTER, he joined the generation of poets whose verse shared at least one characteristic: an overriding concern with the texture, the actual feel, of contemporary urban life. Their poetry is, finally, social rather than lyric, if such a distinction can be made. They do not so much sing of the self as speak bluntly about the society which surrounds them. They view with relatively clear and disenchanted eyes a society built upon ideals of individualism, free enterprise, and progress in all its mechanical and political power, personal anonymity, and public conformity. The feelings and thoughts of ordinary people lie buried somewhere beneath the slogans, advertisements, and downright lies of a mass culture dominated by a faceless state. For example, the poignancy of the sound of a human voice beneath all the whirring of machinery may be discovered in Shapiro’s poem “V-Letter.”

Responding to the same social and political developments as the slightly older British group including Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and MacNeice, the American poets also create no mythologies, celebrate neither a Georgian landscape nor a Golden Age of the past. These poets have given lyricism a tone of irony.

Like the others, Shapiro draws on the materials at hand for the matter of his poems: images of city and suburbia, home, crowds, drugstores, machines, human types drawn from the rigid hierarchies of a democratic society. Also, these poets are somewhat doubtful as to the sense of writing poetry at all. Poetry seems a bit like an effeminate whimper in the face of realities it can never quite express. Shapiro feels this quite strongly.

Power, raw power, is sometimes celebrated in near-lyric fashion, as in Spender’s poem “The Express”; something of the same is seen in Shapiro’s “Buick” and “The Gun.” In all cases it is not the machine that is to blame, or frightening, but the men who made it and use it. If only men had the cold authority of steel they could survive, but the flesh is weak. For all his hard-headedness and irony, Shapiro and others of his kind have, not quite a faith or, finally, pity, but a defiant love for the weak human flesh, for the ordinary man. Ultimately that love for the downright human, the essential, brings Shapiro under the influence of a writer whose apparent callousness he once despised—D. H. Lawrence. It is Shapiro’s doubt and finally his impatience with poetry as such that led him to abandon the ironic formalism of his original style and write the admixture of prose polemic and Whitmanesque verse titled THE BOURGEOIS POET. But this is to anticipate. Consider the poet’s skepticism concerning poetry itself, as expressed in “Poet”; one notes that the tone is fairly bitter and scornful. Shapiro especially, who returned from the Pacific to be lionized by the literary elite, is aware of how the poet can become a cheapened type, sought not for his poetry or for himself, but because he embodies a sentiment.

It is basically Shapiro’s sense of himself as a poet in the modern world which led him first to use rhyme and meter as a technique for irony, and later to abandon that technique because it was, finally, contrived, negative, evasive, the neatness of the rhyme scheme providing a shape, a completeness, which the experience recorded does not have.

The anonymity and even gruesomeness of modern life makes it difficult for a poet to be openly lyrical. Of what shall he sing, what celebrate? Instead, he draws back even from himself, and employs the old trappings of lyric verse for ironic purposes. In “The Gun,” a thing is given more sensibility than the man. In the poem, Shapiro can move toward a swinging, lyric cadence, a heightened phrasing and diction, because his subject is a gun and not himself. There is rhyme in this poem, but the long lines, among other things, prevent the rhyme from having any ironic or sarcastic effect. “The Gun” is illustrative of the plight of modern men, as Shapiro sees it. There is much guilt, but no blame; the anonymity is worse than the bloodshed. The gun, not the man, protests, cries out, is “manly.” Men are seen as dehumanized integers in a cold calculus of abstractions and things. Guns, Buicks, beds, flies—all subjects of poems by Shapiro—take on an ironic human identity. Humans, in contrast, are expendable, weak, pitiable at best. In “Epitaph for John and Richard,” both the pity and the ironic disenchantment are expressed. The natural order is reduced to clockwork, a mechanical process. The close rhymes, the near-doggerel cadence, assert both a sense of the maudlin and a pity which cannot be overtly stated. The events of an ordinary man’s life are matter only for a bureaucratic file, anonymous statistics. Everyone takes his appointed place in a neat order. Only in THE BOURGEOIS POET does Shapiro at last speak on the side of the ordinary mortal and against the orderliness of a society he feels is superficial and life-denying.

Shapiro was born in Baltimore and educated at the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins. He is also Jewish. The hypocrisy and cruelty of the South is a pervasive subject for him. The South is also a subject of honest pity in much of his poetry. Shapiro’s scorn for the South is matched by his pity for its being an outmoded anomaly. Beyond that, he discovers in both the figure of his father, and in the underlings, the outcasts of an aristocratic order, what he comes to value most, his faith.

The Jew, the outcast, becomes allied with men who are outcasts from society. The common man is exiled from his land, as the Jew was. Having been foresaken, the common man becomes in that very commonness, that alienation, the last bulwark against a sterile, dehumanized social order. In this light, Shapiro can even feel kinship with the Southerner.

Thus the common, substandard man becomes Shapiro’s alternative to mechanization, slogan, literary pandering, privilege, and politics. In order to assert this alternative, irony and detachment give way to direct statement, outright expression. The result is, in form and content, THE BOURGEOIS POET. One can go on being ironic only so long. The old feeling that verse is effeminate posturing also remains in his poetry. In his ESSAY ON RIME Shapiro had spoken of discovering a new form for poetry, a richly cadenced and suggestive prose, something like Joyce’s in ULYSSES. Whitman, too, is a forerunner.

With Joyce in mind, but even more noticeably Whitman and Lawrence, Shapiro fashioned the ninety-six sections which make up THE BOURGEOIS POET. The style of this work is, largely, a prose which is more closely patterned after spoken speech than the more formalized patterns of syntax and grammar. Images come in rich sequences; mind and imagination dart and leap, as in very excellent conversation; the utterances are given shape through the repetition of phrases and clauses. These elements of style are also characteristic of modern verse; consequently THE BOURGEOIS POET is often called a prose-poem. Actually, it is a special kind of prose-speech. At times, as at the end of the first section, Shapiro is writing verse and using what is called syntactic prosody. The irony here is not so much one of disenchantment, distance, or self-apology, but is, rather, openly satiric and comic. The whole book is notable for its gusto, its humor, its forthright anger, and its honesty. It is also, too often, stale and derivative.

Shapiro intends to embrace experience, and to do so on the real and humdrum level of bourgeois life. He accepts its formlessness, its contradictions, its relativity of values. Echoing Lawrence, Shapiro calls for a revolt by the natural man who is instinctual, honest, many-sided.

Though Shapiro will not dabble in mythology, his primitivism is an analogous attempt to discover and revivify the essential roots of life, the dried radicals buried beneath the modern society in its conformity and superficiality. He and T. S. Eliot share an aversion to that society, to the misleading Liberal-Rationalistic dogmas of Progress, Individualism, and Perfectability. But whereas Eliot counters with an austere and traditional conception of culture based on the authority of the Church and a conviction of Original Sin, Shapiro is directly opposed in urging the natural, the common, even the unregenerate: Humor vs. intellectual austerity; Apeneck Sweeney vs. The Fisher King. Shapiro’s very human (as opposed to theological) views on Original Sin are expressed in a series of poems entitled “Adam and Eve.” Their sin produces our world, which is preferred over a mythical paradise.

Shapiro’s poet has a comic sense of his own weaknesses, and the ability to reveal them as well as lash out with comic invective at whatever he finds dishonest, posturing, or antihuman. He sometimes resembles Saul Bellow in upholding the unreclaimed, damned, and abidingly human man, the animal with a bothersome but ever-functioning conscience. Shapiro’s love for the ordinary man is such that the sophistication of art becomes perverse and debilitating. Irreverent, bawdy, funny, serious, Shapiro identifies accepted poetry with what has happened to too many people. In rebellion, he makes of himself a sort of latter-day Whitman.