SOURCE: "Karl Shapiro," in American Poetry Since 1945, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 53-68.

In the following essay, Stepanchev discusses the major themes of Shapiro's verse.

Karl Shapiro is another "social poet" who found impetus and subject matter in the public crises of the 1940's, when his private predicament as a soldier in the war against Germany and Japan merged with the predicament of American society as a whole, fighting for its survival. But, although a slow, subdued anger is the permanent emotional climate of an army, Shapiro's tone is rarely angry, even in the poems in which he points out the shortcomings of society—the racial, religious, and economic injustices that he sees about him. And, as a relatively "new" American of Jewish ancestry, he sees these very clearly. In one poem he speaks of a university where "To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew / Is the curriculum"; in...