Karl Jay Shapiro (November 10, 1913– May 14, 2000) was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.

Biography

Karl Shapiro was born in Baltimore, Maryland and graduated from the Baltimore City College high school. He attended the University of Virginia before World War II, and immortalized it in a scathing poem called “University,” which noted that “to hate the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum.” He did not return after his military service.

Karl Shapiro, a stylish writer with a commendable regard for his craft, wrote poetry in the Pacific Theater while he served there during World War II. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems, written while Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, while Shapiro was still in the military. Shapiro was American Poet Laureate in 1946 and 1947. (At the time this title was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress which was changed by Congress in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.)

Poems from his earlier books display a mastery of formal verse with a modern sensibility that viewed such topics as automobiles, house flies, and drug stores as worthy of attention. In 1963, the poet/critic Randall Jarrell praised Shapiro’s work:

Karl Shapiro’s poems are fresh and young and rash and live; their hard clear outlines, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere, of aerial perspective, but with notable visual and satiric force. The poet early perfected a style, derived from Auden but decidedly individual, which he has not developed in later life but has temporarily replaced with the clear Rilke-like rhetoric of his Adam and Eve poems, the frankly Whitmanesque convolutions of his latest work. His best poem—poems like “The Leg,” “Waitress,” “Scyros,” “Going to School,” “Cadillac”—have a real precision, a memorable exactness of realization, yet they plainly come out of life’s raw hubbub, out of the disgraceful foundations, the exciting and disgraceful surfaces of existence.

In his later work, he experimented with more open forms, beginning with The Bourgeois Poet (1964) and continuing with White-Haired Lover (1968). The influences of Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams were evident in his work.

Shapiro’s interest in formal verse and prosody led to his writing multiple books on the subject including the long poem Essay on Rime (1945), A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (1948), and A Prosody Handbook (with Robert Beum, 1965; reissued 2006).

His Selected Poems appeared in 1968. Shapiro also published one novel, Edsel (1971) and a three-part autobiography simply titled, “Poet” (1988–1990).

Shapiro edited the prestigious magazine, Poetry for several years, and he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he edited Prairie Schooner, and at the University of California, Davis, from which he retired in the mid-1980s.

His other works include Person, Place and Thing (1942), (with Ernst Lert) the libretto to Hugo Weisgall’s opera The Tenor (1950), To Abolish Children (1968), and The Old Horsefly (1993). Shapiro received the 1969 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, sharing the award that year with John Berryman.

He died in New York City, aged 86, on May 14, 2000.

More recent editions of his work include The Wild Card: Selected Poems Early and Late (1998) and Selected Poems (2003).

Shapiro’s last work, Coda: Last Poems, (2008) was recently published in a volume organized posthumously by editor Robert Phillips. The poems, divided into three sections according to love poems to his last wife, poems concerning roses, and other various poems, were discovered in the drawers of Shapiro’s desk by his wife two years after his death.

Awards

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
Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress (United States Poet Laureate), 1946–47
Kenyon School of Letters fellowship, 1956–57
Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, 1961
Oscar Blumenthal Prize, Poetry, 1963
Bollingen Prize, 1968
Robert Kirsch Award, LA Times, 1989
Charity Randall Citation, 1990
Fellow in American Letters, Library of Congress

Bibliography

Poetry collections

* Adult Bookstore (1976)
Collected Poems, 1940–1978 (1978)
Essay on Rime (1945)
New and Selected Poems, 1940–1987 (1988)
Person, Place, and Thing (1942)
Place of Love (1943)
Poems (1935)
Poems 1940-1953 (1953)
Poems of a Jew (1950)
Selected Poems (Random House, 1968)
Selected Poems (Library of America, 2003), edited by John Updike.
The Bourgeois Poet (1964)
The Old Horsefly (1993)
The Place of Love (1943)
Trial of a Poet (1947)
V-Letter and Other Poems (1945)
White Haired Lover (1968)
The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)
Coda: Last Poems (2008)

Autobiography

* Poet: Volume I: The Younger Son (1988)
Reports of My Death (1990)
Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1988–1990)

Essay collections

* The Poetry Wreck (1975)
To Abolish children and Other Essays (1968)
A Primer for Poets (1965)
In Defense of Ignorance (1960)
Randall Jarrell (1967)
Start With the Sun: Studies in the Whitman Tradition, with James E. Miller, Jr., and Bernice Slote (1963)
Prose Keys to Modern Poetry (1962)

Novels

* Edsel (1971)

Secondary sources

* Lee Bartlett, Karl Shapiro: A Descriptive Bibliography 1933-1977 (New York: Garland, 1979)
Gail Gloston, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell: The Image of the Poet in the Late 1940s (Thesis: Reed College, 1957)
Charles F. Madden, Talks With Authors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1968)
Hans Ostrom, "Karl Shapiro 1913-2000" (poem), in The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis, 2006)
Joseph Reino, Karl Shapiro (New York: Twayne, 1981)
Stephen Stepanchev, American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey (1965)
Melvin B. Tolson, Harlem Gallery (1965), with an introduction by Karl Shapiro
Sue Walker, ed., Seriously Meeting Karl Shapiro (Mobile: Negative Capability Press, 1993)
William White, Karl Shapiro: A Bibliography, with a note by Karl Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State U. Press, 1960)

References

Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Shapiro