Collected Poems of Karl Shapiro

...In that poem, Eliot walks slowly toward the podium, holding two slim volumes in one hand, "Sensing rather than carrying his books/His mythic poetry that has stunned the world...

...I was reminded of this absence of tribute while reading and rereading this distinguished collection, including at least twenty poems that are indispensable to American language and literature--some from an early volume, Person, Place and Thing (1942), such as "University" and "The Fly," and one from the last volume, The Adult Bookstore (1976), a powerful re-telling of the nightingale story, "The Rape of Philomela," aswell as new and previously uncollected work...

...and Collected Poems is, quite simply, the latest and best evidence for saying so...

...By the popularity of his books, at least ten of them now in print, and the authority of his essays, he continues to enjoy that happy condition of being read for pleasure rather than merely studied...

...By virtue of his range of subject matter and his skill, Karl Shapiro is our' greatest living poet...

...Who, other than he, has written this many poems known and loved by an audience beI I yond the confines of academic courses and writers' workshops...

...Certainly not Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, or a host of other writers often regarded as more "important" than Shapiro, people who, in spite of.their achievements, have given few poems to the common heritage of American literature...

...Other obvious examples of Shapiro at his best include the beautiful love poems, written in the South Pacific during World War II, and the blasphemous or profoundly religious poems, written during his "private flirtation with Catholicism...

...Even the earliest poetry retains its savor over many years and after numerous readings, amid changes in fashion, literary and otherwise...

...I I .f Books: ALIVE WITH NECESSARY POEMS l I HAVE not heard a younger poet speak with any real respect for Karl Shapiro in some time--in spite of his life-long devotion to craft, his intelligence, his achievement in a variety of poetic forms: and his astonishing g~fi as polemicist and pamphleteer...

...Auto Wreck"--perhaps the most fre -~ quently anthologized American poem since Frost's "Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening" (there is even a film based upon the poem)--describes the puzzlement a passer-by feels at the sight of death...

...That book, The White-Haired Lover (1968), contributes only six brief lyrics to the Collected Poems...

...Where history is invented in the History Department and there are no centennials of anything" and the sequence called "Adam and Eve": "Eden ablaze with fires of red and g o l d . . . And it was autumn, and the present world...

...But in a peculiar way, he is...

...The only book-length discussion is a detailed bibliography published twenty years ago...

...Finding so many exceptional poems in the collection, in several voices and styles, may raise a central question in the reader's mind: What older contemporary poet, besides Theodore Roethke, has written so many necessary poems...

...After so much early recognition--a Pulitzer Prize in his early thirties, subsequent membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Bollingen Prize ten years ago--it may sound strange to speak of Karl Shapiro as a "neglected" writer...

...While critics and scholars rush to sort out the confused lines and tangled lives of confessional or suicidal poets his age and younger, in a torrent of scholarly articles, dissertations, and books, Shapiro remains persistently unstudied...

...Most of the criticism, after the early, informed reviews, are actually "notices," showing little awareness of Shapiro's knowledge and craft...

...the poems about places: "Nebraska...

...such an accident, the speaker says, "Cancels our physics with a I COLLECTED POENS: 1940-1978 Karl Shapiro Random House, $15 [352 pp.] Michael True sneer,/And spatters all we know of denouement/Across the: expedient and wicked stones...

...The Fly" conveys that mixture of anger and disgust one feels in battling a household insect, that "hideous little bat the size of snot,/with polyhedral eye and shabby clothes" who climbs "the smoking mountains of my food/And in a comic mood/In midair take[s] to bed a wife...

...Some critics entertain a certain resentment of his tendency to write well in one style, then drop it and move on...

...Shapiro's powers as a poet are further evident in his discrimination, in having selected only his very best work for this volume...

...Long known for his biting wit and occasionally irascible temper, he may simply have scared away any commentators for whom poetry is merely academic...

...And one obvious answer to the question about the lack of extended discussion of such an important writer is that his reputation rests on more solid ground than that rarified turf in the groves of academe...

...just as his essays--written"with gusto and sassiness, with the delight of an amateur filling in," as he says--rage against the indignities and excesses of those years...

...Among the latter group of fifteen poems is a moving tribute to T.S...

...Eliot, the kind of revealing photographic study that Shapiro does so well...

...He is a surprisingly naturalistic writer (Delmore Schwartz once referred to Shapiro's "inexhaustible power of observation"), whose work provides one of the most accurate portraits we have of America from the late Thirties until the early Sixties...

...10 November 1978:725...

...Shapiro succeeds where other poets fail (Robert Lowell is the most obvious example) in making history a part of his poems, showing the reader an event, a period, a world that is on the verge of disappearing, even as it begins to engage our attention...

...After a dedication to rather strict metrical forms, "Telling poems in iambic pentameter,/With a masculine inversion in the second foot" (as he once said, in witty disparagement of his early style), Shapiro wrote a whole book of prose poems, The Bourgeois Poet (1964), then turned sharply (and unsuccessfully) to the sonnet form...

...His poems tell us what it was like to be alive during those decades...