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

Critical Essay by M. L. Rosenthal

SOURCE: "The Shapiro Question," in The Nation, Vol. 187, No. 1, July 5, 1958, pp. 14-15.

In the following review, Rosenthal calls Poems of a Jew uneven and desultory.

Poems of a Jew, work mainly taken from earlier volumes, has Karl Shapiro's usual unevenness. Look hard at some of the pieces and their interest flies away like the white fluff of aged dandelions in the wind. The best ones, poems of an intense and brooding introvert, glow and crackle and burst into flame—unless the poet tries (as usually he does try) to fan them with his intellect. For it is matter of great sorrow that Shapiro, though his best work is that of an emotionalist sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, can't really think. When he makes the attempt he seems an inferior Auden, a decapitated Hamlet, or a flunked-out Talmudist.

I call to witness the mass of...
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