Poetry and prose by Karl Jay Shapiro

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry.

How to write specific forms:
Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka.
Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát.
Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Poets: Adam Zagajewski. Aleda Shirley. The Beowulf Poet. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise.
Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Charles Atkinson. Corey Marks. Franz Wright. Galway Kinnell. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet.
Jack Gilbert. Jane Hirshfield. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Karl Shapiro. Kay Ryan.
Laureate Poets: Britain; USA.
Louise Glück. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A).
Richard Hugo. Robert Bly. Sara Teasdale. Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn. Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

The Poetry Wreck: Selected essays 1950-1970 About Karl Shapiro

Poetry of Karl Jay Shapiro

Prose of Karl Jay Shapiro

Buy The Poetry Wreck: Selected essays 1950-1970

Essays critical of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Auden, and enthusiastic of William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Miller.

From Shapiro's Foreword:

"The political simple-mindedness and viciousness of the great trio of Pound, Eliot and Yeats incriminate the Academy and the literary establishment which have the touchstones of our age. ... These essays do not follow a chronology but describe roughly the military evolutions of modern poetry, the bastions of the Trio, assaults upon the towers and their occupations, the comings and going of the ambassador Auden, Dylan Thomas (the troubadour in the kitchen), the burning of Whitman at the stake, the Tom O'Bedlam antics of Henry Miller, the heroics of Williams, down through the witchcraft of the psychologists and the rise of the rabble poets. ... Instead of poetry as the essence and culmination of the poet, we look at poetry as a by-product or excrescence of his behavior."

and "Strip away from the twentieth-century poetry all the sociology and all the politics, and see what is left. Precious little, perhaps, but yet something to conjure with and something our descendants will remember us by."

Includes:

"T.S. Eliot: The Death of Literary Judgment." Shapiro's concerns about Eliot's work include:

"Eliot appeared at a time when the vitality of the audience was low; and when this is the case, criticism pours into the void. It is the critic in the guise of poet that we have to deal with, not a new kind of poet. For it is criticism which is the twentieth-century substitution for poetry."

and "The strategic purpose of Eliot's criticism was to prevent judgment; that is the purpose of the criticism which he gave birth to (called the New Criticism), to replace judgment by theory. Eliot's own judgment is seldom shown, governed as it is by precept. His intellectualization of feeling and taste led him to such twisted judgments as the praise of Kipling and the execration of Whitman, the approval of Donne and the disparagement of Milton."

and "The use of quotation without reference has a further advantage: it creates a specialized class of readers ... providing texts for a new academic faculty."

Shapiro's praise for Eliot's work includes:

"'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'--this is probably Eliot's best poem and is a little masterpiece of its kind. It is highly unoriginal in content and in style, based as it is on the rhythms, the attitudes, and sometimes the very lines of the minor Symbolist poets like Corbière and Laforgue. ... The meter is varied within the conventional English line, and the rhyming is superb. ... It is a true poem by virtue of a personal content, which we can only guess at, for Eliot is always more sensitive about the autobiographical than any other writer I know of. ... Eliot displays a mastery of sound and rhythm which marks the poet of genius."

and "Eliot's reputation to a large extent is based upon the poems of this early period, and rightly so. 'Prufrock,' 'Portrait of a Lady,' 'Preludes,' and the 'Rhapsody' are among his best works. Of these, 'Prufrock' is head and shoulders above the rest and is sufficient to justify Eliot's claim as one of the most gifted twentieth-century poets."

Concerning Eliot's The Waste Land:

"That it is lacking in unity is obvious (assuming, as I do, that unity is a literary virtue). Any part of The Waste Land can be switched for any other part without changing the sense of the poem. ... The proof of the failure of the 'form' of this poem is that no one has ever been able to proceed from it, including Eliot himself."

Concerning Eliot's Four Quartets:

" ... After that [ed.: Ash Wednesday] ... Four Quartets is the only attempt at what modern criticism calls a 'major' poem--meaning a poem that deals with Culture wholesale. The Quartets were hailed by the Eliot critics as his crowning achievement; actually they are evidence of the total dissolution of poetry skill and even a confession of poetic bankruptcy. Eliot is quite open about this in the Quartets."

and "Eliot has traded poetry for the metaphysical abstraction. ... diction devoid of both image and music."

Shapiro's assessment of Eliot's motivation:

"The motivating force in Eliot's work is the search for the mystical center of experience. This search in his case has been fruitless and increasingly frustrating. Eliot's entire career is a history of his failure to penetrate the mystical conscious. He begins as a youth with Symbolism when it is already a dying religious-esthetic mystique. He moves ... to the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. ... Eliot was fascinated by the Metaphysical poem because it is virtually a demonstration of prayer. ... Third, he attempted secular mythology as a way to penetrate the mystical conscious. It was in this phase that he wrote The Waste Land, a poem which is a jumble of sacred and 'profane' myths, adding up to nothing. ... Poets of more recent vintage [ed. than Dante, St. John of the Cross, and similar] who come closer to mysticism infuriate Eliot, and he pours out his scorn on Blake, Lawrence, Whitman and our own Transcendalists."

and "The failure to achieve mystical consciousness ... drove Eliot back to metaphysics proper and to religion proper. This in my view is the great failure of Eliot. Eliot ends up as a poet of religion in the conventional sense of that term."

and "Witch-hunting runs through Eliot from beginning to end. Eliot is a poet of religion, hence [ed. dubious logic] a poet of the second or third rank; he is a thoroughgoing anachronism in the modern world, a poet of genius crippled by lack of faith and want of joy."

"Ezra Pound: The Scapegoat of Modern Poetry".

Concerning Pound's poetry:

"I have read Pound's poetry all my life, carefully, with pain and with pleasure, and I know that his poetry is insane."

and "Pound has chosen to be the 'poet of ideas.' ... There are two large classes of 'ideas' in Pound's work: one has to do with works of poetry (his esthetic), and the other with social ideas. The second category comprises whatever he has to say about philosophy, science, history, ethics, and economics. All of the ideas in the second class are ... vulnerable because they all relate back to source works, other books. This throws Pound into an arena where readers of any description can have a go at him. "

and "Pound's lifelong problem was to establish an equation between poetry and society, between the esthetic and the politick. The nexus is economics. ... Pound acts out the pathetic drama of Modern Poetry, that of trying to make a place for the poet in the modern world by remaking the world. It is in this phase that Pound's so-called insanity has been brought to the attention of nonliterary folks. "

and "If it is the high responsibility of the poet to clarify the language, as the good ruler clarifies economic life, then certainly we should expect the poetry of Pound to execute this service. But instead of clarity and precision we get an epic poem which not even scholars can read without long study. Once the University of California published an index to the Cantos with seventeen thousand references to names, dates and other factual information in the poem. Certain references could not be solved even by the editors; nor would the author lend a helping hand! "

"W.B. Yeats: Trial by Culture."

"The flaw in Yeats is his narrowly conceived idea of civilization; Yeats is quite eighteenth-century in the long run. He loved Blake, but did he really learn anything from Blake? It appears not. There is no marriage of heaven and hell in William Butler Yeats--save in Byzantium. Think of the Byzantium mozaic and then try to set beside it the flowing angelography of Blake's pen. There is a complete divergence of imaginations.

The key with Yeats is the word 'civilization,' the alpha and omega of his culture philosophy. And civilization appearently is--Byzantium. Little wonder that Yeats, a scant generation after his death, is considered a master craftsman of the poem, and nothing else."

"The Retreat of W.H. Auden."

"I doubt whether any man liveing has read everything published by W.H. Auden, probably the most prolific poet-critic of the twentieth century. Not only the quantity but the range of Auden's writing is the most extensive of any comtemporary poet's; what is more remarkable, everything he writes is readable. ... Auden, however, is not popular. Like all Moderns he has eschewed popularity. ... It is Auden's fascination with psychological behavior that makes him readable, charming, and, it may be, lasting. The retreat of Auden is the retreat from poetry to psychology, an almost total sacrifice of the poetic motive to the rational motive. ... Auden is truly a civilized, rational poet ... and the father of contemporary poetic style. ... poetry to him is a species of talk. The retreat of poetry into talk, which Auden has made a respectable poetics, is part of the canon of Modernism. ... A poet's religious and pollitical attitudes are of no concern to the reader unless they become part of the poetry. ... Auden has always been too detached from people, one gathers from his poetry, and too excited by theories about people (psychology) to ever become more than a paper Romantic."
and "Auden's great achievement ... is the modernization of diction, the enlarging of dictional language to permit a more contemporary-sounding speech. In this endeavor he has created a revolution in English poetic speech ... [and a] return to the standard forms.

and:

"Auden, in fact, has created a genre, the intellectual lyric."

"William Carlos Williams: The True Contemporary."

"Williams is fighting for the existence of poetry (while Eliot and Pound fought for the 'uses' of poetry). "

and:

"There is practically no American poetry to speak of, and nearly all of it has come in the twentieth century, and a good portion of that has been written by William Carlos Williams. ... he saw the challenge from the beginning and he saw it whole: to create American poetry out of nothing, out of that which had never lent itself to poetry before. To do this without betraying the present to the past (like Eliot) and without exploiting the present (like Sandburg) and wihtout trinhg to force the future (like Pound). I call him the true contemporary because he could not resist trying to write the Great American Epic. But in Williams' case this can be overlooked: he has written enough true poetry to shoe the twentieth century that American and poet are not contradictions in terms."

"Dylan Thomas."

"Writers said of Thomas that he was the greatest lyricist of our time. The saying became a platitude. It was unquestionably true, but what did the word mean? It meant that, in contrast tot he epic pretensions of many of hte leading modern poets, he was the only one who could be called a singer. To call him the best lyric poet of our time was to pay him the highest, the only compliment."

"The First White Aboriginal."

"D.H. Lawrence has more in common with Walt Whitman than any other man has, and it was Lawrence who called Whitman the first white aboriginal. Coming from Lawrence, the epithet was the highest praise. Lawrence's quest was for the aboriginal, the pure energy of the soul."

"The Greatest Living Patagonian."

"What is a Patagonian? I don't know, but it is certainly something rare and sui generis. We can call [Henry] Miller the greatest living Patagonian."
"The Decolonization of American Literature."
"Is Poetry and American Art?"

"The True Artificer."

Concerning Eliot's The Waste Land:

"The Death of Randall Jarrell.""

"Randall Jarrell ... was the poet whose poetry I admired and looked up to most after William Carlos Williams."

"The Career of the Poem."

Concerning Eliot's The Waste Land:

"American Poetry?"

Concerning Eliot's The Waste Land:

"The Poetry Wreck." A cranky essay on "the degeneration of the literary intelligence and the attendant confusion everywhere in our lives."

About Karl Jay Shapiro

1913: Born in Baltimore, Maryland. Attended University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University.
1945: V-Letter and other poems (his second book of verse) awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A).
1946: Appointed Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Subsequently, this post is renamed as the USA Poet Laureate.
1947: Faculty of Johns Hopkins University.
1950: Became editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
1956: Completed his editorship of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
Became professor of English and editor of The Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska.
1966: Became professor of English at the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois.
1968: Became professor of English at the University of California at Davis.
1969: Awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry.

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