Karl Shapiro; Poet Won Pulitzer Prize at 32

Karl Shapiro, whose World War II poetry, written when he was a young soldier stationed in New Guinea, earned him instant literary recognition and a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, died Sunday in a New York City hospice. He was 86.

In his long career as a poet, essayist, novelist, editor and teacher, the iconoclastic Shapiro may have been best known for the poem “Elegy for a Dead Soldier,” written in 1944, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “V-Letter and Other Poems.”

“Karl Shapiro is a very important but neglected member of the middle generation of poets, such as Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell,” the critic and poet Edward Hirsch told The Times on Wednesday. “As American poetry was moving beyond modernism, he was one of the new writers who helped bring tenderness back into poetry.”

Shapiro, however, struggled mightily with the results of the fame that came to him at a young age. He was 32 when he won the Pulitzer, which he later called--writing of himself in the third person--”a golden albatross that he would have to fight to keep from owning him,” and was named consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress--the post now called poet laureate--at the age of 34. He noted in the first book of his memoirs that “to be put on a pedestal before your clay was dry was to invite disaster.”

Shapiro’s early work, strongly influenced by W.H. Auden’s traditional style, was overwhelmingly well received. “His early poetry in meter, rhyme and stanza was noted for its sharp social observation and Audenesque wit,” Louis Simpson, himself a Pulitzer-winning poet, said of Shapiro. “In his later poetry he experimented in free forms and wrote a poetry of feeling. His was an enthusiastic and generous spirit.”

In a diverse career, Shapiro edited Poetry magazine and then Prairie Schooner during the 1950s and ‘60s, while publishing his own poetry, prose and criticism.

“As editor of Poetry magazine, he . . . helped shape poetry for a new generation,” Hirsch said.

He went on to teach writing at Johns Hopkins University and literature at the University of Illinois before landing at UC Davis, where he taught literature from 1968 to 1985. He seemed amused by his nomadic work life, writing, again in the third person, “The way he shed jobs, like a poodle shaking off bath water, astonished his friends.”

A native of Baltimore, Shapiro enrolled in the University of Virginia at the age of 19 but stayed for only one year. A small collection of his poetry appeared shortly thereafter, in 1934. He worked as a clerk, salesman and librarian before entering Johns Hopkins University in 1936, remaining there until 1939. The following year he took a course in library science at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

His poems have appeared in the Nation, the New Yorker, New Republic and Harper’s.

His work first received serious attention in 1941 when a group of his poems appeared under the title, “Noun in Five Young American Poets.” After induction into the Army that same year and assignment to the medical corps, Shapiro was stationed in the South Pacific. It was during that period that he wrote “Elegy for a Dead Soldier,” and most of the work included in “V-Letter.”

The title for “V-Letter” came from censors’ practice of microfilming letters home from U.S. soldiers before their delivery. The poems re-create the tension between intense wartime experiences and the sense of detachment from events that many soldiers felt while trying to conduct their lives away from the fighting.

Shapiro was one of three men in active war service to receive a Guggenheim award of $2,500 for creative work. He was also a recipient of a special award of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After his release from the Army, Shapiro immediately became consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress--the youngest poet ever to receive the distinction.

“When I first got into poetry around 1946, Karl Shapiro was a significant presence,” the poet Philip Levine commented Wednesday. “That he could write in spoken American English and in traditional forms, the forms we typically associate with English poetry, was enormously important to me. Here was a modern urban guy who spoke right to me.”

But as his career progressed, Shapiro would challenge the value of his early work, viewing the traditional form as stifling to the poet’s creativity. In lectures and essays, he championed the free verse of Walt Whitman and the Beat poets. He later criticized such modern poetic heavyweights at T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who Shapiro believed were making poetry “ a diseased art.”

“His book, ‘Poems of a Jew,’ was an important acknowledgment from a poet writing from the margins of society,” Hirsch said. “In light of the enormous influence and prestige of T.S. Eliot, Shapiro’s poems are very brave in their commitment to Judaism and a human-centered poetic after the war.”

This commitment helped put him on the fringe of literary thought, however.

“He seemed determined to move himself to the margins, away from the systems, structures and literary establishments of the country,” Hirsch added, “no matter how hard people tried to bring him to the center.”

Shapiro was prematurely reported dead in the late 1970s when the Journal of the American Medical Assn. included his name in a list of writers who had committed suicide. Years later, the New York Times compounded the mistake when he showed up under the clue “late U.S. poet” in a crossword puzzle. Shapiro filed suit against the AMA and settled out of court. Several years later he called his 1990 autobiography “Reports of My Death.”

In all, he published more than 20 volumes of poetry.

“I still think he is the best American poet of World War II,” Levine said Wednesday. “There was an honesty and directness in his war work that still holds up. Yet he kept experimenting, probing and trying new things, and in the end he moved beyond the urban wit we associate with his early work to a poetry of religious vision.”

In 1969 he won the Bollingen Prize, American poetry’s highest honor. Shapiro also won a number of national and regional prizes, including the Robert Kirsch Award presented by the Los Angeles Times in 1989 for a body of work by a writer living in or writing on the American West.

Shapiro is survived by his wife, Sophie Wilkins of New York City; a son; a daughter; and three grandchildren.