Karl Shapiro Critical Essay | Critical Essay by M. L. Rosenthal

Critical Essay by M. L. Rosenthal

SOURCE: An introduction to The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, by Karl Shapiro, edited by Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. xix-xxiii.

In the following essay, Rosenthal surveys the defining characteristics of Shapiro's poetry.

"Shapiro Is All Right!" Thus exclaimed the title of a review, years ago, of one of Karl Shapiro's books in the New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was William Carlos Williams, Shapiro's senior by three decades and our best-loved avant-garde model since the late 1920s. It was a bit of a surprise. The inventor of the "variable foot," experimenter par excellence in search of a poetry rooted in American idiom and speech-rhythms, was praising Shapiro, who had gained his early fame working in conventional forms, with debts to Auden and other British figures. The present collection shows why the younger poet won the Old Master's shout of approval.