Shapiro as Editor, Critic and Poet

The Robert Kirsch Award--for a body of work by a writer living in or writing on the American West--is presented this year to poet Karl Shapiro. Born in Baltimore in 1913, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, Shapiro has been one of the most distinguished writers of his day. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the winner of many poetry prizes, including the Pulitzer (1945) and the Bollingen (1969), Shapiro is also is a distinguished editor and critic. For six years he was editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. For nearly 20 he was professor of English literature at the University of California, Davis. He has been the author, over the years, of several books of criticism, including “Beyond Criticism” (re-issued as “A Primer for Poets”), as well as dozens of critical essays, some of which were collected in the 1975 volume “The Wreck of Poetry: Selected Essays 1950-1970.”

Shapiro’s 1964 poetry collection, “The Bourgeois Poet,” marked a shift from the more traditional forms of his earlier work (see the poem “University,” reprinted at left) to the more exploratory forms of his later work. At its most traditional, however, Shapiro’s work is never less than candid and expressive; while at its most exploratory, it moves with the power and dignity of remembered forms. Shapiro can write about the sufferings of whole nations, as Yeats could; about the smallest subtleties of social mood, as Auden did; even, as in the poem “And Now, the Weather . . . ,” about winter rain blowing east from California. Admired early, Karl Shapiro will be admired late as well, re-discovered--we may count on it--many times over by American generations still to come.