I have not heard a younger poet speak with any real respect for Karl Shapiro in some time—in spite of his life-long devotion to craft, his intelligence, his achievement in a variety of poetic forms; and his astonishing gift as polemicist and pamphleteer. I was reminded of this absence of tribute while reading and rereading this distinguished collection [his Collected Poems: 1940–1978], including at least twenty poems that are indispensable to American language and literature.

Shapiro succeeds where other poets fail (Robert Lowell is the most obvious example) in making history a part of his poems, showing the reader an event, a period, a world that is on the verge of disappearing, even as it begins to engage our attention. He is a surprisingly naturalistic writer (Delmore Schwartz once referred to Shapiro's "inexhaustible power of observation"), whose work provides one of the most accurate portraits we have of...