SOURCE: "The Trials of a Poet," in The New Criterion, Vol. 6, No. 8, April, 1988, pp. 74-81.

In the following mixed review of New & Selected Poems, 1940-1986, Richman notes the mediocre level of Shapiro 's recent verse and discusses the influence of W. H. Auden on his career.

The first thing one notices about Karl Shapiro's New & Selected Poems, 1940-1986 is the slimness of the volume. Shapiro, who is seventy-four years old, has written some fourteen books of verse—beginning with Person, Place and Thing, published in 1942 when the author was a sergeant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, up through Love & War Art & God, which came out four years ago. This substantial body of work, most of which is unavailable, has been reduced by Shapiro to 103 pages. It is therefore no surprise that New & Selected Poems, 1940-1986 gives no sense of the scale of Shapiro's oeuvre. What it...