The Poet's Dictionary

Karl Shapiro won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for V-Letter and Other Poems (1944). Born in Baltimore, he attended the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University. After service in the army, he was appointed consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress in 1946 and joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins. There he taught writing courses until his resignation in 1950 to become editor, for a period, of Poetry. Shapiro is an accomplished poet in a wide variety of styles. Like others of his generation, his early work displays a concern with life and institutions of modern society. His later work included a series of bold love poems, The White-Haired Lover (1968). Typical of critics' response to Shapiro is Ralph J. Mills, Jr.'s assessment of The Bourgeois Poet (1964), in which Shapiro "breaks with accepted metrical patterns to attempt a poetry of direct speech. . . ."The Bourgeois Poet' definitely has about it the air of a new imaginative release. Irony and social criticism are still there, but autobiography, invective, heavy doses of sexuality. . . and an occasional prophetic note are now blended together" (Contemporary American Poetry). 020