The Return of Karl Shapiro?

After Shapiro won his Pulitzer, gates opened, invitations were offered, emoluments flashed. He was made consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress in 1946. A writing professorship at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, the city of his birth, followed; he was the second Jew to be hired in the history of the Hopkins English Department. From 1950 to 1956, he was the editor of Poetry, the oldest and easily most highly regarded magazine devoted to verse in America. Under its founding editor, Harriet Monroe, Poetry had published T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, all the great names in modern poetry; its European correspondent was Ezra Pound. The kingdom of poetry in the twentieth century, as in the twenty-first, was always a small one–a mountain principality, really–but Karl Shapiro, not yet forty, had a commanding place in it.

Yet today, when asked to name the key poets of Shapiro’s generation, most people at the English-major level of culture would answer Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and (less likely) Delmore Schwartz and Theodore Roethke. All were poets who fell to insanity and alcoholism, or, in Wordsworth’s phrasing, in their youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. Karl Shapiro never cracked up. Instead he made a few crucial decisions, took a number of significant positions, that went a long way toward scuppering his career.

Before getting on to this, though, it needs to be said that John Updike’s compilation of Karl Shapiro’s poems–a selection of the strongest poems from the various books of poetry Shapiro published over a long career–is a splendid reminder of how good a poet Karl Shapiro could be. One of the first things to be said about Shapiro’s poetry is that, various though it is, it is never gloomy. A pleasure in life, in its richness, variety, and oddity, informs many of his poems, even those that verge on the dark, such as “Auto Wreck,” a poem about coming upon an auto crash as a young man on his way home after leaving the bed of a lady friend. The arbitrariness of death by such a cause is what rightly strikes him:

For death in war is done by hands;
Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;
And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.
But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.

Similarly, in a poem called “Hospital,” one of the few memorable poems not included in this collection, Shapiro begins by reminding that Inside or out, the key is pain, but then goes on to catalogue the abundance of possibilities that lie within the walls of This Oxford of all sicknesses:/ Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews / And actresses whose legs were always news. He could make a poem out of a fly, and in fact did, beginning: O hideous little bat, the size of snot.

But I don’t want to make Karl Shapiro seem a cheerful or relentlessly upbeat poet. (“Optimists,” noted Paul Valéry, “write badly.”) He could also be angry, satirical, and smart about his contrarian nature. The prose poem “I Am an Atheist Who Says His Prayers” resounds with this last quality: I am an anarchist and full professor at that. . . . / Physically a coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff. His sympathies tended to be wide, as a poet’s should be; and his poem “Conscientious Objector,” written by a man who in combat himself won several Bronze Stars, is better because subtler than E.E. Cummings’s famous conscientious objector poem “I Sing of Olaf.” Shapiro’s poem ends:

You suffered not so physically but knew
Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind.
Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach
Erupting in his face damn all your kind.
Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us
Are equally with those who shed the blood
The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is
What we come back to in the armistice.

Karl Shapiro wrote no great poems–no “Sunday Morning,” no “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” no “Wreck of the Deutschland,” no “Sailing to Byzantium,” no “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening–” though in his “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” he came close. Write three or four great poems, and one is, officially, a great poet. But Shapiro wrote lots of good, even excellent poems. And he wrote few poems without a passage or phrase that grips and grabs and causes a reader to marvel. His poems all end well. He was a prosodic master, and in one of his books, “Essay on Rime,” he showed mastery of more kinds of meter than the man from Commonwealth Edison.

THE CHIEF POETIC INFLUENCES on Shapiro were probably William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden. From the first, he picked up confidence in his own Americanness, at a time when almost all other poets wrote with a nervous look over their shoulders to T.S. Eliot in England; an eye for the larger subject inhering in the small object (“no ideas but in things,” Williams famously wrote); and a comrade in the campaign against a literary modernism whose program, Shapiro came to believe, meant a death of direct feeling in the composition of poetry. He rated Williams’s poetry “over and above that of Pound and Eliot and Cummings and Marianne Moore.”

The influence of Auden was very different. In two separate poems, “W.H.A.” and “At Auden’s Grave,” both reprinted in Updike’s selection, Shapiro lauds Auden for all he had done to open up poetry to contemporary language and thought. In the first poem, he writes: God bless this poet who took the honest chances; / God bless the live poets whom his death enhances. And in the second he adds: I come to bless this plot where you are lain, / Poet who made poetry whole again.

While recognizing that “Auden’s great achievement . . . is the modernization of diction, the enlargement of dictional language to permit a more contemporary-sounding speech,” Shapiro in the end concludes that Auden will be remembered as “a great stylist, not [as a] primary poet, the actual creator of poetry like Hopkins or Rimbaud or, among his contempor-aries, Dylan Thomas.” He also faults Auden for being the father of the academic poem in which, owing to his overarching irony and other arts of indirection, one finally doesn’t know what the poet actually believes.

Shapiro’s own beliefs are never in doubt. Nor do many of his poems require what, in the 1950s and 1960s, used pretentiously to be called explication de texte. Language, syntax, meaning, all are straightforward enough–all buoyed by precision and an urban comic touch. It is California in winter and outside / Is like the interior of a florist shop, is a characteristic opening line. How do I love you? begins a poem of that title, and instead of attempting to count the ways, the response is, I don’t even know.

ONE SENSES in many of Karl Shapiro’s poems that he feels the time to go about the work of being a poet with a straight face has already passed. We are too rich with books, our blood / Is heavy with over-thoughtful food, / Our minds are gravid–and yet to try / To backtrack to simplicity / Is fatal. Part of his admiration for William Carlos Williams was because he worked as an obstetrician and was thus able to confront life and draw from it for his writing directly in a way not quite available to the professional poet. “Williams wanted to be a doctor, have a family, live near New York City, and write poetry. As far as anyone knows, he did all these things admirably.”

How different from the poets of Shapiro’s own generation, where, as he describes the situation in one of the prose poems of “The Bourgeois Poet,” “established poets are forced to wear beards and bluejeans; they are treated kindly in bohemian zoos; mysterious stipends drift their ways.” And then there is this, from “The Poetry Reading”:

But he who reads thinks as he drones his song:
What do they think, those furrows of faces,
Of a poet of the middle classes?
Is he a poet at all? His face is fat.
Can the anthologies have his birthday wrong?
He looks more like an aging bureaucrat
Or a haberdasher than a poet of eminence.
He looks more like a Poet-in-Residence.

The job of teaching didn’t, in Shapiro’s case, help. Now when I drive behind a Diesel-stinking bus / On the way to the university to teach / Stevens and Pound and Mallarmé, / I am homesick for war.

W.H. Auden said that the right time to be born if one were to be a major poet was between 1870 and 1890, and the remark contains the wistfulness of one–Auden was born in 1907–who feels he came along too late. Something of this spirit also weighs on Shapiro’s middle and later poems. Poetry had already lost its audience. To write poetry in America, said Henri Coulette (an American poet despite his Frenchified name), is “like making love to someone sound asleep.” Unlike Auden and Coulette, though, Shapiro had an argument for why things went wrong.

He must have had the first inkling of what it is when, as one of the Fellows of American literature who comprised the jury for the Bollingen Poetry Prize of 1949, he voted against giving the prize to Ezra Pound and found himself alone with one other juror (Katherine Garrison Chapin, who was also Mrs. Francis Biddle) in doing so. In a symposium in Partisan Review on the subject of giving an award to Pound, who was then resident in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C., Shapiro wrote: “I voted against Pound in the balloting for the Bollingen Prize. My first and more crucial reason was that I am a Jew and cannot honor anti-Semites. My second reason is as I stated in a report which circulated among the fellows: ‘I voted against Pound in the belief that the poet’s political and moral philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standards as literary work.’ This statement I would place against the official statement of the Fellows, which seems to me evasive, historically untrue, and illogical.”

The other members of the panel of jurors were W.H. Auden, Conrad Aiken, T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Louise Bogan, Robert Penn Warren, Willard Thorpe, Paul Green, Katherine Anne Porter, Theodore Spencer, and Leonie Adams, all of whom took the line that, whatever Pound’s politics, his contributions to poetry outweighed them. Shapiro must have felt the loneliness of his decision–I think it was the correct one–and it not only marked him as a man distinctly not traveling with the gang, but must have encouraged the iconoclastic strain that already ran strong in him.

ICONOCLASTS are never more useful than when there is an abundance of false idols to tip over or smash. Shapiro soon attempted to knock over the largest of them, in what, if he were a White House speechwriter, he might have called the Pound-Eliot Axis. The first thing Shapiro noticed was the tireless log-rolling that Pound and Eliot carried on in each other’s behalf, with each poet regularly pumping up the other’s achievements and talents. Eliot, for example, called Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” a great poem, to which Shapiro appends the comment that “no one but T.S. Eliot would ever call it a good, much less a great poem.” Together Pound and Eliot created what he called “a kingdom of Modern Poetry in which T.S. Eliot is the absolute monarch and Archbishop of Canterbury in one.” He pronounced Eliot “a thoroughgoing anachronism in the modern world, a poet of genius crippled by lack of faith and want of joy.”

When Ezra Pound, coming on as a revolutionary, talked about “making it new” in poetry, he meant creating a poetry that would make use of colloquial American speech, tossing standard iambic pentameter overboard and abandoning the tradition of English verse that began in the fourteenth century with Chaucer. It hasn’t worked out that way; instead the Pound-Eliot Axis has succeeded, with the aid of the academic New Critics, in creating a poetry where ideas and symbols replace feeling and pure love of language.

SHAPIRO PUBLISHED his attacks on Eliot and Pound in a collection of essays with the ill-chosen title “In Defense of Ignorance.” What he intended by the title was his preference for freshness and direct experience over the intellectual desiccations of Eliot and the righteous wrongness of Pound. But the title “In Defense of Ignorance,” which shows Shapiro letting his iconoclasm run away from him, was equivalent to writing a book favoring integration and entitling it “In Defense of Racism.” When the book first appeared in 1960, various critics and poets very much with the gang lined up to kick its author in the most tender places.

Today Shapiro’s arguments seem more cogent than ever. Looking back on the history of twentieth-century poetry, one realizes that what Pound and Eliot accomplished, along with the building up of their own reputations, was removing poetry “from the people” and delivering it “to the classroom.” They destroyed, Shapiro felt, “all emotion for poetry except for poetry arising from ideas.” The joining of Eliot and Pound to the New Critics, in Shapiro’s view, entailed “the voluntary withdrawal of the audience” from poetry, in which “critics have created an academic audience, that is, a captive audience.” I.A. Richards, one of the leading figures among the New Critics, Shapiro called “the man who tried, and almost succeeded, in driving the poetic mind into the test tube.” F.O. Matthiessen lined up for the Eliot-Pound program, even though his leftist politics couldn’t have been more different than theirs. But, then, just about everyone signed up in those days, and down to the present not many have resigned.

Did poetry in America ever have a wider audience than the one provided by the classroom? Difficult to say. But there were times when men and women who liked to think themselves cultivated felt they ought to know poetry, if only because, in Ezra Pound’s definition, “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost degree,” and nowhere was it more highly charged than in poetry. I recall Paul Freund, the Harvard Law School professor, telling me that he read and loved the poems of Wallace Stevens. My guess–though I hope I am wrong–is that no one on the Supreme Court today knows who Wallace Stevens is. Poetry receives its spurts of attention, but spurts they remain. Shapiro mentions Dylan Thomas, who, he says, “made a jump to an audience which, we have been taught to believe, does not exist.” But serious poetry today is chiefly an academic matter, a cult interest, presided over by teacher-priests, village explainers, to a transient audience of students, who, once out of the university, never have to deal with it again, and usually don’t.

THE DIVIDING LINE, the point at which poetry became wholly of academic interest was the publication and critical success of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” a poem that needed to be read under conditions laid down by the academic Sanhedrin. William Carlos Williams felt that the poem was “the great catastrophe,” adding, “it wiped out our world, as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it. . . . I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years. . . . Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape.” Shapiro writes that “had Williams been as good a theoretician as he was a poet he would probably be the most famous American poet today.” But it was Eliot, an even better theoretician than poet, who was left to take on his self-appointed critic’s job of, in his own phrase, “correcting taste.” And correct it he did, insofar as possible, to resemble his own.

Karl Shapiro was a lively and slashing critic, and reading him one feels windows opening, clouds passing, sunlight, and a fresh breeze entering the room. Alas, he is more impressive on the attack than on the defense. What he chooses to defend is the tiresome, let ‘er rip, standard team of literary romantics: Blake, Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, & Co. In this mode he wrote an essay entitled “The Greatest Living Author,” who turns out to be the novelist Henry Miller, about whom Shapiro wrote: “I claim that Miller is one of the few healthy Americans alive today; further that the circulation of his books [this was written while Henry Miller’s novels were still censored in the United States] would do more to wipe out the obscenities of Broadway, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue than a full-scale social revolution.” Shapiro did not usually lapse into such mega-clichés. A pity, too, that he allowed himself to get caught in the game of choosing sides. In many fields, neither of the two contending sides is worthy of the allegiance of an intelligent person. Some kinds of ignorance are indefensible.

Shapiro himself, as he grew older, was perhaps rather too hipped on sex; he wrote a light porno novel called “Edsel,” which I read when it was published in 1971 and am pleased to have forgotten almost in its entirety. Of his literary enemies, he wrote: “Pound is sexless, Eliot ascetic, Yeats roaring with libidinal anguish.” In what he calls “the religion of modern poetry,” he claimed “the Trinity is composed of Pound, Eliot, and Yeats,” though he cut Yeats greater slack, writing that he “was never happy in the company of either” Eliot or Pound and, despite his confused turn to magic and mysticism, was a greater poet than both.

Intellectual courage was required for Shapiro to say the things he did, and for doing so he was, in effect, read out of the grand lodge of established poets. In 1976, John Updike notes, Karl Shapiro was dropped from the “Oxford Book of American Verse,” in which, in earlier editions, he had had a prominent place. His teaching jobs were at less than the best brand-name universities: Nebraska, then the University of California at Davis. His books of poems, although they continued to be printed, were reviewed harshly, then increasingly ignored. His sense of his own declining status is nicely caught in a poem, very much in the Shapiro spirit, entitled “My Fame’s Not Feeling Well,” which ends: Sloth, acedia, ennui, otiose pride / Got it into this fix, so let it be. / I’m not one to take its history.

Publication of Karl Shapiro’s poetry by the Library of America for its new “American Poets Project,” well selected and gracefully introduced by John Updike, will doubtless revive Shapiro’s fame–though for how long, who can say? The hope of permanent fame may be the second-silliest motive for a career in poetry; the first is, of course, the hope for riches. Karl Shapiro wrote the best poems he could, and his best were extraordinarily good; and in prose he never wrote anything he didn’t believe, a practice not many poets have been able, or appear even to try, to maintain. He plied his craft with the honor that only complete integrity brings–and next to this, fame, passing or permanent, seems a small and shriveled thing.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.