SOURCE: "Karl Shapiro and the Great Ordeal," in The Nation, Vol. 159, No. 12, September 16, 1944, pp. 327-28.

In the following review, Dupee offers a mixed assessment of V-Letter and Other Poems

By now most readers are probably tired of war literature and would like to get back to literature. Not only is much of the writing inferior; but we are kept from saying so by reason of the censorship inflicted on us by our war-time piety. Yet in the case of Karl Shapiro, whose new poems were written during the more than two years that he has been on active duty in the Southwest Pacific, it seems impossible not to invoke the war. By what drama of adjustment has he continued writing? The question would be irrelevant, I admit, if his adjustment had resulted in a book which was continuous in thought and quality with his earlier one, Person, Place...