American poet
Karl Jay Shapiro
(November 10, 1913 ? May 14, 2000) was an American
poet
. He was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
in
1945
for his collection
V-Letter and Other Poems
.
[1]
He was appointed the fifth
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
in 1946.
Shapiro served in the
Pacific Theater
as a
United States Army
company clerk
during
World War II
.
Biography
[
edit
]
Shapiro was born and initially raised in
Baltimore, Maryland
. After spending much of his childhood and adolescence in
Chicago, Illinois
, the family returned to Baltimore, where he completed his secondary education at
Baltimore City College
.
[2]
He briefly attended the
University of Virginia
during the 1932-1933 academic year,
[3]
and wrote about it in a critical poem called "University", which noted that "to hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum."
[4]
His first volume of poetry was published by a family friend at the behest of his uncle in 1935. After continuing his studies at the
Peabody Institute
(where he majored in
piano performance
), he attended
Johns Hopkins University
on a scholarship from 1937 to 1939. In 1940, he enrolled in a
library science
school associated with Baltimore's
Enoch Pratt Free Library
, where he was also employed.
Shapiro wrote poetry in the
Pacific Theater
while he served there as a
United States Army
company clerk
during
World War II
. Throughout the conflict, he engaged in near-daily correspondence with his fiancee and first wife, Evalyn Katz (m. 1945-1967), who moved to
New York City
to act as his
literary agent
in 1942. In this capacity, Katz facilitated the publication of much of his early oeuvre.
[5]
His collection
V-Letter and Other Poems
,
[1]
written while Shapiro was stationed in
New Guinea
, was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
in
1945
, while Shapiro was still in the military. From 1946 to 1947, he served as Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress
, succeeding
Louise Bogan
; this position was reclassified by Congress in 1985 as the
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
.
[6]
Poems from his earlier books display a mastery of formal verse with a modern sensibility that viewed such topics as automobiles, houseflies, 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.
[7]
In his later work, he repudiated the epochal influence of
Ezra Pound
(whom he voted against in the inaugural
Bollingen Prize
deliberations in 1949, citing the poet's
antisemitism
) and
T.S. Eliot
, drawing instead upon the stylistic innovations of the
Beat Generation
and its progenitors, including
Walt Whitman
,
D.H. Lawrence
,
Dylan Thomas
,
Henry Miller
and
William Carlos Williams
.
[8]
However,
Morris Dickstein
would later opine that his "maverick role seemed strictly literary" vis-a-vis the
alternative lifestyles
of such Sixties "culture heroes" as
Norman Mailer
and
Allen Ginsberg
. Nevertheless, this immersion led to experimentation with more open forms, beginning with
The Bourgeois Poet
(1964) and continuing with
White-Haired Lover
(1968). His 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). In his 1948 lecture,
Poetry and Technique
, the American poet
Eli Siegel
described Karl Shapiro as one of the "technique boys," poets who were highly skilled at structures of prosody. His
Selected Poems
appeared in 1968. Shapiro also published one novel,
Edsel
(1971), and a two-volume memoir (1988?1990).
[9]
[10]
Although he never completed his undergraduate degree, Shapiro returned to Johns Hopkins as an
associate professor
of writing from 1947 to 1950. Based again in
Chicago
, he served as the full-time editor of
Poetry
from 1950 to 1956. During this period, he served as a visiting professor at the
University of California, Berkeley
(1955?1956) and as a visiting fellow at
Indiana University
(1956?1957). Thereafter, he returned to academia in earnest, serving as a professor of English and editor of
Prairie Schooner
at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
for a decade (1956-1966). After briefly joining the faculty of the
University of Illinois Chicago
from 1966 to 1968, he moved to the
University of California, Davis
, where he became
professor emeritus
of English in 1985.
[11]
His other works include
Person, Place and Thing
(1942), the libretto to
Hugo Weisgall
's opera
The Tenor
(1950; with
Ernst Lert
),
To Abolish Children
(1968) and
The Old Horsefly
(1993). Shapiro also received the 1969 Bollingen Prize, sharing the award with
John Berryman
.
[12]
Death and legacy
[
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]
By 1984, Shapiro began to divide his time between
California
and an apartment in the
Manhattan Valley
section of the
Upper West Side
of Manhattan, where he initially spent at least half the year.
[13]
He became a full-time resident of New York in 1994.
[5]
In 1985, Richard Tillinghast of
The New York Times Book Review
asserted that Shapiro had become "more a name than a presence," and he obtained a settlement from the
American Medical Association
after the organization "mistakenly included him in a list of writers who had committed suicide."
[14]
As early as 1978, Shapiro had been erroneously characterized as a "late U.S. poet" in a
New York Times
crossword puzzle
clue.
[14]
He died at a New York City
hospice
, aged 86, on May 14, 2000. Survivors included his third wife, Sophie Wilkens (m. 1985), along with three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. More recent editions of his work include
The Wild Card: Selected Poems Early and Late
(1998) and the
John Updike
-edited
Selected Poems
(2003). His 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 Wilkens, 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
[
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]
- Jeanette S Davis Prize and Levinson Prize, both from
Poetry
, 1942
- Contemporary Poetry Prize, 1943
- American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1944
- Guggenheim Fellowships, 1944, 1953
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1945
- Shelley Memorial Prize, 1946
- Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1946?1947
- Indiana University
School of Letters
Fellowship, 1956?1957
- Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, 1961
- Oscar Blumenthal Prize, Poetry, 1963
- Bollingen Prize, 1969
- Robert Kirsch Award,
Los Angeles Times
, 1989
- Charity Randall Citation, 1990
- Fellow in American Letters, Library of Congress
Bibliography
[
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]
Poetry
[
edit
]
- Poems
(1935)
- Person, Place, and Thing
(1942)
- The Place of Love
(1943)
- V-Letter and Other Poems
(1944)
[1]
- Essay on Rime
(1945)
- Trial of a Poet
(1947)
- Poems of a Jew
(1950)
- Poems 1940-1953
(1953)
- The Bourgeois Poet
(1964)
- Selected Poems
(Random House, 1968)
- White Haired Lover
(1968)
- Adult Bookstore
(1976)
- Collected Poems, 1940?1978
(1978)
- New and Selected Poems, 1940?1987
(1988)
- The Old Horsefly
(1993)
- The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late
(1998)
- Selected Poems
(Library of America, 2003), edited by
John Updike
- Coda: Last Poems
(2008)
Memoir
[
edit
]
- The Younger Son
(1988)
- Reports of My Death
(1990)
Essays
[
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]
- 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
[
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]
Secondary sources
[
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]
- 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
[
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]
- ^
a
b
c
Shapiro, Karl (1944).
V-letter : and other poems
. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock.
OCLC
21529587
.
- ^
Jacques, Kelly (16 May 2000).
"Karl Shapiro, 86, Baltimore-born prize-winning poet"
.
Baltimore Sun
.
- ^
"University of Virginia Library Online Exhibits | All the Hoos in Hooville: 175 Years of Life at the University of Virginia"
.
- ^
"University by Karl Shapiro"
.
Poetry Magazine
. 2023-02-15
. Retrieved
2023-02-15
.
- ^
a
b
"Collection: Karl Shapiro papers | Archival Collections"
.
- ^
Scannell, Vernon
Not Without Glory
Woburn Press, London 1976;
ISBN
0713000945
- ^
Jarrell, Randall. "Fifty Years of American Poetry." No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
- ^
"THE BOURGEOIS AND THE MAD DOG CRITIC - The Washington Post"
.
The Washington Post
.
- ^
Shapiro, Karl Jay (1971).
Edsel
. B. Geis Associates.
ISBN
9780848806255
.
- ^
Shapiro, Karl, 1913-2000. (1988?1990).
Poet : an autobiography in three parts
(1st ed.). Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
ISBN
0-912697-86-5
.
OCLC
17651234
.
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link
) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (
link
)
- ^
"Shapiro, Karl Jay 1913?2000 | Encyclopedia.com"
.
- ^
Borders, William (1969-01-06).
"Berryman and Shapiro Share Award; Bollinger Prize for Poetry Carries a $50,000 Stipend"
.
The New York Times
.
ISSN
0362-4331
. Retrieved
2020-06-04
.
- ^
Phillips, Interviewed by Robert (1986).
"The Art of Poetry No. 36"
. Vol. Spring 1986, no. 99.
- ^
a
b
Severo, Richard (17 May 2000).
"Karl Shapiro, Prize-Winning Poet, Dies at 86"
.
The New York Times
.
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