Karl Shapiro

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Karl Jay Shapiro , also Carl Jay Shapiro (born November 10, 1913 in Baltimore ; died May 14, 2000 in New York City ) was an American poet.

Life

Carl Jay Shapiro was a son of the moving company and sales representative Joseph Shapiro and Sarah Omansky. He attended school in Chicago and Baltimore and began studying at the University of Virginia , where he suffered from overt racism and anti-Semitism. He switched to piano studies at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University without completing his studies with an exam. His first volume of poems was published privately in 1935, and in 1940 Poetry magazine printed some of his poems.

During the Second World War he was shipped to Australia as a medical soldier in the Pacific War in 1942 with the Queen Mary and used in Dutch New Guinea . He wrote four volumes of poetry about the war situation, one of which was published in Melbourne . The volume V-Letter and Other Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 .

After the end of the war, he married his literary agent Evalyn Katz in 1945; he was later married twice. In 1946/47 he was Consultant for Poetry at the Library of Congress .

In 1948 he publicly opposed the award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to the fascist and anti-Semite Ezra Pound and in 1950 answered questions about survival after the Holocaust with the provocative title Poems of a Jew . He published the essay The Greatest Living Author on Henry Miller and his Tropic of Cancer in Paris in 1960 , shortly before the book was approved by the censors in the USA and went into print with its foreword.

Shapiro was the editor of the influential Poetry magazine from 1950 to 1956 . He taught literature from 1948 to 1950 at Johns Hopkins University , then at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln , where he also served as editor of the literary magazine Prairie Schooner from 1956 to 1966 . He taught at the University of Illinois from 1966 to 1968 and at the University of California (Davis) from 1968 to 1985 . In 1994 he returned to New York.

Shapiro was twice a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1969 received the Bollingen Prize together with John Berryman . Also in 1969 Shapiro was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1959 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Shapiro initially wrote in the traditional style of WH Auden . He later wrote Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams , experimented with open poem forms and also researched linguistic aspects of poetics. Shapiro was forgotten and, to his annoyance, his entry disappeared from the 1976 edition of the anthology The Oxford Book of American Verse .

He has published a novel and a two-volume autobiography.

Fonts (selection)

Essay on Rime (1945)
Poetry
  • Poems . Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1935
  • Person, Place, and Thing . New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942
  • The place of love . Melbourne, 1943
  • V-Letter and Other Poems (1944)
  • Essay on Rime (1945)
  • Trial of a Poet . To FO Matthiessen , New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947
  • Poems of a Jew (1950)
  • Poems 1940-1953 (1953)
  • The Bourgeois Poet . New York: Random House, 1964
  • White Haired Lover (1968)
  • Selected Poems . New York: Random House, 1968
  • Adult Bookstore (1976)
  • Collected Poems, 1940-1978 (1978)
  • New and Selected Poems, 1940–1987 (1988)
  • The Old Horsefly (1993)
  • Stanley Kunitz , David Ignatow (Eds.): The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)
  • Coda: Last Poems (2008)
Autobiography
  • The Younger Son (1988)
  • Reports of My Death (1990)
A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (1948)
Literary criticism
  • Essay on Rime . New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945
  • A Bibliography of Modern Prosody . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1948
  • Beyond Criticism (1953)
  • In Defense of Ignorance (1960)
  • Prose Keys to Modern Poetry (1962)
  • with James E. Miller; Bernice Slote (Ed.): Start With the Sun: Studies in the Whitman Tradition (1963)
  • A Primer for Poets (1965)
  • Randall Jarrell (1967)
  • To Abolish Children and Other Essays (1968)
  • The Poetry Wreck: Selected Essays 1950–1970 (1975)
novel
  • Edsel (1971)
libretto

literature

  • John Updike : Karl Shapiro: Selected Poems , in: Due Considerations. Essays and Criticism . London: Penguin, 2008, pp. 169-179
  • Lee Bartlett: Karl Shapiro: a descriptive bibliography; 1933-1977 . New York: Garland, 1979 ISBN 0-8240-9812-9
  • Karl Shapiro , in: Jules Chametzky u. a. (Ed.): Jewish American literature: a Norton anthology . New York: Norton, 2001 ISBN 0-393-04809-8 , pp. 553-557
  • Harry J. Cargas : Daniel Berrigan and contemporary protest poetry . New Haven, Conn. : College & Univ. Pr., 1972, pp. 31-46

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Shapiro: Introduction , in: Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer , New York: Grove Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8021-3178-2 , pp. V – XXX
  2. ^ Members: Karl Shapiro. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 26, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Shapiro, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shapiro, Karl Jay; Shapiro, Carl Jay (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 2000
Place of death New York City