SOURCE: "The Power and the Hazard," in Poetry, Vol. LXXI, No. VI, March, 1948, pp. 314-18.

In the following essay, Spender provides a mixed review of Trial of a Poet.

This is Mr. Shapiro's fourth volume of published poetry, and in common with his previous volume, Essay on Rime, it shows him intensely preoccupied with the problem of how and what the poet should write. Considering that this problem is for him as yet unsolved, it seems a little tiresome that he should be so insistent that the solution should lie in writing like Karl Shapiro. Probably Shapiro would gain by dealing with his own problem as really his own and not every other poet's more than he gains by trying to make literary maps just at the time when his own difficulties are most obvious. Another danger for him lies in his own considerable mental power and energy...