In an essay first published in The Writer's Experience (1964) Karl Shapiro recalled a woman who came up to him just before a lecture he was about to give on anarchism and said crisply: "I don't believe a word you are going to say, and I don't think you do either." The anecdote illustrates Shapiro's reputation as a provocateur and--as far as his poetry and poetics are concerned--brings to mind his controversial attack on the poetic establishment, particularly against the hegemony of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats. The wisdom of Shapiro's iconoclastic crusade against the kind of poetry written by Pound and Eliot and of his espousal of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams as the true shapers of twentieth-century American poetry has been vindicated by the theory and practice of American poets during the 1950s and 1960s.

Shapiro's own poetry has been far less...