Karl Shapiro

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Karl Jay Shapiro (10 November 1913, Baltimore, Maryland - 14 May 2000, New York City) was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.

Life
Karl Shapiro was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended the University of Virginia before World War II, and immortalized it in a scathing poem called "University," which noted that "to hate the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum." He did not return after his military service.

Karl Shapiro wrote poetry in the Pacific Theater while he served there during World War II. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems, written while Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, while Shapiro was still in the military. Shapiro was American Poet Laureate in 1946 and 1947. (At the time this title was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress which was changed by Congress in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.)

Poems from his earlier books display a mastery of formal verse with a modern sensibility that viewed such topics as automobiles, house flies, and drug stores as worthy of attention. Later work experimented with more open forms, beginning with The Bourgeois Poet (1964) and continuing with White-Haired Lover (1968). The influence of Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams is evident in his work.

Shapiro's interest in formal verse and prosody led to his writing a long poem about the subjects, Essay on Rime (1945); A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (1948); and, with Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (1965; reissued 2006).

Selected Poems appeared in 1968, and Shapiro published one novel, Edsel (1971) and a three-part autobiography, "Poet" (1988-1990).

Shapiro edited the prestigious magazine Poetry for several years, and he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he edited Prairie Schooner, and at the University of California, Davis, from which he retired in the mid-1980s.

His other works include Person, Place and Thing (1942), (with Ernst Lert) the libretto to Hugo Weisgall's opera   The Tenor (1950), To Abolish Children (1968), and The Old Horsefly (1993). Shapiro received the 1969 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, sharing the award that year with John Berryman.

He died in New York City, aged 86, on May 14, 2000.

More recent editions of his work include The Wild Card: Selected Poems Early and Late (1998) and Selected Poems (2003).

Shapiro's last work, Coda: Last Poems, (2008) was recently published in a collected volume post-mortem by editor Robert Phillips. The poems, divided into three sections according to love poems to his last wife, poems concerning roses, and other various poems, were discovered in the drawers of Shapiro's desk by his wife two years after his death.

Recognition

 * Jeanette S Davis Prize and Levinson prize, both from Poetry in 1942
 * Contemporary Poetry prize, 1943
 * American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1944
 * Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, 1944, 1953
 * Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1945, for V-Letter and Other Poems
 * Shelley Memorial Prize, 1946
 * Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress (United States Poet Laureate), 1946-47
 * Kenyon School of Letters fellowship, 1956-57
 * Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, 1961
 * Oscar Blumenthal Prize, Poetry, 1963
 * Bollingen Prize, 1968
 * Robert Kirsch Award, LA Times, 1989
 * Charity Randall Citation, 1990
 * Fellow in American Letters, Library of Congress

Poetry

 * Adult Bookstore (1976)
 * Auto Wreck (1942)
 * Collected Poems, 1940-1978 (1978)
 * Essay on Rime (1945)
 * New and Selected Poems, 1940-1987 (1988)
 * Person, Place, and Thing (1942)
 * The Fly (1942)
 * Place of Love (1943)
 * Poems (1935)
 * Poems 1940-1953 (1953)
 * Poems of a Jew (1950)
 * Poet: Volume I: The Younger Son (1988)
 * Selected Poems (Random House, 1968)
 * Selected Poems (Library of America, 2003), edited by John Updike.
 * The Bourgeois Poet (1964)
 * The Old Horsefly (1993)
 * The Place of Love (1943)
 * Trial of a Poet (1947)
 * V-Letter and Other Poems (1945)
 * White Haired Lover (1968)
 * The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)
 * Coda: Last Poems (2008)

Autobiography

 * Reports of My Death (1990)
 * Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1988-1990)

Essays

 * The Poetry Wreck (1975)
 * To Abolish children and Other Essays (1968)
 * A Primer for Poets (1965)
 * In Defense of Ignorance (1960)
 * Randall Jarrell (1967)
 * Start With the Sun: Studies in the Whitman Tradition, with James E. Miller, Jr., and Bernice Slote (1963).
 * Prose Keys to Modern Poetry (1962).

Novels

 * Edsel Dope (1971)