SHAPIRO, KARL JAY

SHAPIRO, KARL JAY (1913–2000), U.S. poet and critic. Born in Baltimore, during World War II Shapiro was a soldier in the Pacific campaign. From 1950 to 1955 he edited the Chicago periodical Poetry, and from 1956 he was professor of English at the State University of Nebraska. He wrote forcefully on many kinds of experience and showed a preoccupation with his own attitude toward Judaism. In such early poems as "The Synagogue" and "The Jew" (both 1943), he affirmed that his religion was flexible and easily diluted, and that he tried to write freely, "one day as a Christian, the next as a Jew." In his Poems of a Jew (1958), which he called "documents of an obsession," Shapiro asserted that "man is for the world, not for the after-world"; yet, while rejecting any special Jewish commitment, he declared that mere abandonment of the Jewish religion did not negate Jewish identity, and he even admitted a measure of pride (in the poem "Israel") in the Jewish state's restoration of dignity to the Jewish name. In an interview published in 1981, he said: "In my case, the tradition was the Jew, not Judaism, not the religion, but the existence of the Jew as a person, as a creature, even as a kind of mystical presence." He believed that Walt Whitman was America's greatest poet. He was also appreciative of Dylan Thomas as well as of William Carlos Williams. He said that "it wasn't until some of the contemporary English poets like Auden and Spender began to publish …(that) I really saw the possibilities of using contemporary English … contemporary twentieth-century English…." His critical works include an Essay on Rime (1945), a critique of poetry in verse; Beyond Criticism, lectures (1953), reprinted as Primer for Poets (1965); In Defense of Ignorance (1960); and The Bourgeois Poet (1964), on the poet in society. He also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning V-Letter and Other Poems (1944); Trial of a Poet … (1947); Poems, 1940–1953 (1953); an anthology Selected Poems (1968); To Abolish Children, and Other Essays (1968); and White-haired Lover (1968), a collection of love poems. His novel Edsel appeared in 1971; Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts, in 1988; The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, edited by Kunitz and Ignatow, in 1998; and Creative Glut: Selected Essays of Karl Shapiro, edited by Robert Phillips, in 2004. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Bartlett, Karl Shapiro, A Descriptive Bibliography: 1933–1977 (1979); P. Gerber, "Trying to Present America: A Conversation with Karl Shapiro," in: Southern Humanities Review (Summer 1981), 193–208; J. Reino, Karl Shapiro (1981)