Shapiro, Karl Jay 1913–2000

PERSONAL: Name legally changed to Karl Shapiro in 1920; born Carl Shapiro, November 10, 1913, in Baltimore, MD, USA; died May 14, 2000, in New York, NY; son of Joseph (in business) and Sarah (Omansky) Shapiro; married Evalyn Katz (a secretary), March 25, 1945 (divorced, January, 1967); married Teri Kovach, July 31, 1967 (divorced, July, 1982); married Sophie Wilkins, April 25, 1985; children: (first marriage) Katharine, John Jacob, Elizabeth. Education: Attended University of Virginia, 1932–33, Johns Hopkins University, 1937–39, and Enoch Pratt Library School, 1940. Politics: Republican.

CAREER: Library of Congress, Washington, DC, consultant in poetry, 1946–47; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, associate professor of writing, 1947–50; Poetry, Chicago, IL, editor, 1950–56; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, professor of English, 1956–66; University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, professor of English, 1966–68; University of California, Davis, professor of English, 1968–85. Lecturer in India, summer of 1955, for U.S. Department of State. Visiting professor or lecturer at University of Wisconsin, 1948, Loyola University, 1951–52, Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, 1952, University of California, 1955–56, and Indiana University, 1956–57. Member, Bollingen Prize Committee, 1949. Military service: U.S. Army, 1941–45.

MEMBER: National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary), Phi Beta Kappa, PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow in American Letters, Library of Congress; Jeanette S. Davis Prize and Levinson prize, both from Poetry in 1942; Contemporary Poetry prize, 1943; American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1944; Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, 1944, 1953; Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1945, for V-Letter and Other Poems; Shelley Memorial Prize, 1946; Kenyon School of Letters fellowship, 1956–57; Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, 1961; Oscar Blumen-thal Prize, Poetry, 1963; Bollingen Prize, 1968; Robert Kirsch Award L.A. Times, 1989; Charity Randall Citation, 1990; Library of Congress fellowship.

WRITINGS:

English Prosody and Modern Poetry, Johns Hopkins Press (Baltimore, MD), 1947, reprinted, Folcroft Library Editions, 1975.

A Bibliography of Modern Prosody, Johns Hopkins Press (Baltimore, MD), 1948, reprinted, Folcroft Library Editions (Folcroft, PA), 1976.

(Editor with Louis Untermeyer and Richard Wilbur) Modern American and Modern British Poetry, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1955.

(Author of libretto) The Tenor (opera; music by Hugo Weisgall), Merion Music (Bryn Mawr, PA), 1956.

(Editor) American Poetry (anthology), Crowell (New York, NY), 1960.

(Editor) Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1962.

(With Robert Beum) Prosody Handbook, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1965.

Edsel (novel), B. Geis Associates (New York, NY), 1970.

(Editor with Robert Phillips) Letters of Delmore Schwartz, Ontario Review Press/Persea Books (New York, NY), 1984.

The Younger Son: Poet; An Autobiography in Three Parts; The Youth and War Years of a Distinguished American Poet, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1988.

Reports of My Death: An Autobiography, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1990.

POETRY

Poems, Waverly Press (Baltimore, MD), 1935.

(Contributor) Five Young American Poets, New Directions, 1941.

Person, Place, and Thing, Reynal & Hitchcock (New York, NY), 1942.

The Place of Love, Comment Press, 1942.

V-Letter and Other Poems, Reynal & Hitchcock (New York, NY), 1944.

Essay on Rime, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1945.

Trial of a Poet and Other Poems, Reynal & Hitchcock (New York, NY), 1947.

(Contributor) Poets at Work, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1948.

Poems: 1940–1953, Random House (New York, NY), 1953.

The House, privately printed, 1957.

Poems of a Jew, Random House (New York, NY), 1958.

The Bourgeois Poet, Random House (New York, NY), 1964.

Selected Poems, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

White-Haired Lover, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

Adult Book Store, Random House (New York, NY), 1976.

Collected Poems: 1948–1978, Random House (New York, NY), 1978.

Love and War, Art and God, Stuart Wright, 1984.

Adam and Eve, edited by John Wheatcroft, Bucknell University, Press of Appletree Alley (Lewisburg, PA), 1986.

New and Selected Poems, 1940–1986, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1987.

The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, edited by Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1998.

Essay on Rime; with Trial of a Poet, edited with afterword by Robert Phillips, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2003.

Selected Poems, edited by John Updike, Library of American (New York, NY), 2003.

Creative Glut: Selected Essays of Karl Shapiro, edited and with introduction by Robert Phillips, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2004.

LITERARY CRITICISM

Beyond Criticism, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1953, published as A Primer for Poets, 1965.

In Defense of Ignorance, Random House (New York, NY), 1960.

(With James E. Miller, Jr., and Beatrice Slote) Start it with the Sun: Studies in Cosmic Poetry, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1960.

(With Ralph Ellison) The Writer's Experience, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), 1964.

Randall Jarrell, Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), 1967.

To Abolish Children and Other Essays, Quadrangle Books (Chicago, IL), 1968.

The Poetry Wreck: Selected Essays, 1950–1970, Random House (New York, NY), 1975.

AUTHOR OF INTRODUCTION

Pawel Majewski, editor, Czas Niepokoju (anthology; title means "Time of Unrest"), Criterion, 1958.

Jack Hirschman, A Correspondence of Americans, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1960.

Bruce Cutler, The Year of the Green Wave, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1960.

Also author of screenplay "Karl Shapiro's America," 1976. Work appears in anthologies. Contributor of articles, poetry, and reviews to Partisan Review, Poetry, Nation, Saturday Review, and other periodicals. Editor, Poetry, 1950–56, Newberry Library Bulletin, 1953–55, and Prairie Schooner, 1956–66. Some of Shapiro's papers are held in the Library of Congress's Archival Manuscript Materials Collection.

SIDELIGHTS: Karl Jay Shapiro's poetry received early recognition, winning a number of major poetry awards, including the Pulitzer prize, during the 1940s. Strongly influenced by the traditionalist poetry of W.H. Auden, Shapiro's early work was "striking for its concrete but detached insights," Alfred Kazin wrote in Contemporaries. "It is witty and exact in the way it catches the poet's subtle and guarded impressions, and it is a poetry full of clever and unexpected verbal conceits. It is a very professional poetry—supple and adaptable." Stephen Stepanchev noted in American Poetry since 1945: A Critical Survey, that Shapiro's poems "found impetus and subject matter in the public crises of the 1940's and all have their social meaning."

Although his early traditionalist poetry was successful, Shapiro doubted the value and honesty of that kind of poetry. In many of his critical essays, he attacked the assumptions of traditionalist poetry as stifling to the poet's creativity. "What he wants," Paul Fussell, Jr., commented in Partisan Review, "is a turning from received and thus discredited English and European techniques of focus in favor of honest encounters with the stuff of local experience." In lectures and essays, Shapiro championed the works and poetic theories of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, two poets who broadened the possibilities of American poetry by defending new prosodies of open form.

In the poetry of both Whitman, which he memorized in his youth, and the Beat poets, Shapiro found a confirmation of his own idea of feeling over form. In his collection The Bourgeois Poet, Shapiro broke with his traditional poetic forms in favor of the free verse of Whitman and the Beats and the new poems also contained insights and an apocalyptic tone that was shocking compared to other poetry being published at that time.

Person, Place and Thing, containing poems that had won the Levinson prize when published in Poetry magazine, was applauded by the critics. Directly confronting subjects such as love, the history of the South in which Shapiro grew up an outsider, or the war in the South Pacific in which he served as a medical corps clerk, the poems were received as palpable "attacks." His most frequent target in the poems, related Ross Labrie in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, was the "dehumanized technocracies" that fostered urban decadence and sent men and women to war without regard for their worth as persons. In a Poetry review of a later book, Love and War, Art and God, David Wojahn commented that social criticism had always been part of Shapiro's work. Wojahn wrote, "From the very beginning, Shapiro identified himself as an iconoclast, and his outsider's role extended beyond his attacks on social injustice. At a time before it was fashionable to do so, he proudly proclaimed his Jewishness and set himself against the main trends of Modernism."

Coming of age in the United States had much to do with Shapiro's development as an iconoclast. In his introduction to Poems of a Jew, he wrote, "As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families." In a Paris Review interview, Shapiro explained how being both a Jew and a poet also partly accounted for his point of view as an "outsider": "I've always had this feeling—I've heard other Jews say—that when you can't find any other explanation for the Jews, you say, 'Well, they are poets.'… The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society's idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or a troublemaker…. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive—you have to at least pretend that you are 'seriously' in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all." Wojahn pointed out that Shapiro's stance as a social critic did not make the poems cynical. "For all his stridency, Shapiro could be a wonderfully tender poet…. This side … materializes in empathic portraits like 'The Leg' and 'The Figurehead,' as well as in the poems that focus on Shapiro's experience in the military during World War II."

Shapiro published the Pulitzer prize-winning volume V-Letter and Other Poems in 1944 while serving with the U.S. Army in New Guinea. V-letters were letters written by American soldiers and microfilmed by censors before delivery to the United States. The poems recreate the tension between the intensity of wartime experiences and a sense of detachment from events that many soldiers felt while trying to conduct their personal lives over the obstacles of distance and the added obstacle of the censors. Though he appreciated what the award would do to establish his career as a writer, Shapiro felt more honored when he found out that copies of V-Letter and Other Poems had been placed in all U.S. Navy ship libraries.

In 1988, Shapiro published the first volume in a planned three-volume autobiography. This volume, titled The Younger Son, details Shapiro's childhood and early manhood, including his World War II experience and the beginnings of his literary career. While "the poet," as Shapiro referred to himself throughout the volume, divulges little information about his relationship with his parents and the experiences of his youth, he is more expansive when discussing his wartime tour of duty, when he managed a prodigious poetic output while caring for wounded soldiers. Shapiro arrived home in 1945 having just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for V-Letter. Commenting on the author's use of the third person in the book and the resulting detachment from his life that is implied, Sewanee Review contributor David Miller noted that "The mood is an eerie one of diminishment and distance." However, Miller concluded that "The Younger Son is beautifully styled, honest, and fascinating."

Shapiro continued his autobiography with 1990's Reports of My Death, the title referring to inaccurate media reports in the 1980s that Shapiro had committed suicide. The volume covers the period between 1945, when Shapiro returned home from World War II, and 1985, chronicling the process of Shapiro's literary development; his stints as editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner; his controversial decision to vote against Ezra Pound as recipient of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry; and his gradual fading from the literary limelight during the 1970s and 1980s. Again referring to himself in the third person, Shapiro openly discusses his numerous extramarital affairs, his disgust with the American literary scene, and his frustration at being dropped from the prestigious Oxford Book of American Verse. "Shapiro has written a beautiful book, not only tracing the long career of 'the poet' but doing so in dreamy, mellifluous sentences that sometimes left me feeling euphoric," remarked Morris Dickstein in the Washington Post Book World. Several critics expressed disappointment with Shapiro's decision not to date important events and not to identify people who figure prominently in his story. World Literature Today critic John Boening felt that "such indirectness may make the book rough going for future generations." Nevertheless, Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Larry Kart declared that Shapiro's two volumes of autobiography "not only rank with Shapiro's finest poetic achievements but also will come to occupy … a high place in the canon of American autobiography."

New York Times contributor Laurence Leiberman saw Shapiro as one of "a generation of poets who … wrote a disproportionate number of superbly good poems in early career, became decorated overnight with honors … and spent the next twenty-odd years trying to outpace a growing critical notice of decline." Leiberman found The Bourgeois Poet to be Shapiro's attempt to "recast the poetic instrument to embody formerly intractable large sectors of his life" and to win "a precious freedom to extend the limits of his art." Leiberman saw the two styles in Shapiro's poetry, the traditionalist and free verse, as enhancing each other. He believed that Shapiro's "future work stands an excellent chance of merging the superior qualities of two opposite modes: the expressiveness of candid personal confession and the durability of significant form."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 6, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 53, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 48: American Poets, 1880–1945, Second Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Jarrell, Randall, The Third Book of Criticism, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1969.

Kazin, Alfred, Contemporaries, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1962.

Nemerov, Howard, Poetry and Fiction, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1963.

Rosenthal, M. L., The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1960.

Scannell, Vernon, Not without Glory, Woburn Press (London, England), 1976.

Shapiro, Karl, Poems of a Jew, Random House (New York, NY), 1958.

Spears, Monroe K., Dionysus and the City, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1970.

Stepanchev, Stephen, American Poetry since 1945: A Critical Survey, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1965.

White, William, Karl Shapiro: A Bibliography, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 1960.

PERIODICALS

America, January 7, 1989, p. 14.

Antioch Review, Volume 31, number 3, 1971.

Books, March, 1964.

Book Week, August 2, 1964.

Book World, July 28, 1968.

Carleton Miscellany, spring, 1965.

Christian Science Monitor, July 3, 1968.

College English, February, 1946.

Commonweal, September 19, 1958; January 20, 1960; October 4, 1968.

Esquire, April, 1968.

Harper's, August, 1964.

Hollins Critic, December, 1964.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1975; summer, 1988.

Kenyon Review, winter, 1946.

Literary Times, June, 1967.

Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1968; May 18, 2000, p. B8.

Nation, July 5, 1958; September 24, 1960; August 24, 1964; November 11, 1978.

New Republic, November 24, 1958.

New Yorker, November 7, 1964.

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, May 8, 1960.

New York Times, July 29, 1968; January 6, 1969; October 4, 1971.

New York Times Book Review, September 7, 1958; May 8, 1960; July 14, 1968; August 18, 1968; July 25, 1976; March 31, 1985, Richard Tillinghast, review of Love and War—Art and God, p. 14; November 27, 1988, Wendy Brumer, review of The Younger Son: Poet; An Autobiography in Three Parts; The Youth and War Years of a Distinguished American Poet, p. 23; May 13, 1990, Evelyn Toynton, review of Reports of My Death, p. 25.

Paris Review, spring, 1986, interview with Karl Shapiro.

Partisan Review, winter, 1969.

Poetry, June, 1965; April, 1969; July, 1969; February, 1970; June, 1985.

Prairie Schooner, winter, 1965.

Publishers Weekly, March 2, 1990, p. 67.

Saturday Review, September 27, 1958; April 15, 1978.

Sewanee Review, winter, 1965; April, 1989, David Miller, review of The Younger Son, p. 283.

Southern Review, winter, 1973.

Time, August 2, 1968.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 30, 1988; July 15, 1990, Larry Kart, review of Reports of My Death, p. 3.

Village Voice, March 29, 1976.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1969.

Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1976.

Washington Post, January 4, 1980; December 9, 1988.

Washington Post Book World, July 1, 1990, Morris Dickstein, review of Reports of My Death, p. 1.

Western Review, spring, 1954.

World Literature Today, winter, 1992, John Boening, review of Reports of My Death, p. 139.

Yale Review, winter, 1954; June, 1975.

ONLINE

Bucknell University, http://www.bucknell.edu/ (September, 2004), "Karl Shapiro."

OTHER

Poets in Person. Karl Shapiro with Joseph Parisi. Poets in Person. Maxine Kumin with Alicia Ostriker, Modern Poetry Association (Chicago, IL), sound cassette, 1991.