''He offended many in the literary culture with a certain brashness of tone in voice, a refusal to be conciliatory,'' reflected 1959 Poetry winner Stanley Kunitz, a longtime friend who co-edited a volume of his selected poems. ''He was a guy who took great chances. He was a gambler. He played the wild card for high stakes and this is not what the academician/critics wanted.''
A third-generation Jewish American, Shapiro was born Carl Jay Shapiro in Baltimore on November 10, 1913. Raised there and in Chicago by a traveling salesman and homemaker, he became immersed in poetry as a student at Baltimore City College, the city's selective public high school.
It remained his primary vocation as he pursued an unusually peripatetic higher education at various institutions, including the University of Virginia, from which he withdrew after failing to acclimate to its upper class social milieu; the Peabody Institute; a scholarship-funded two-year stint at Johns Hopkins' liberal arts division; and a training program at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, where he maintained a day job in the buildup to World War II. Despite these setbacks, an uncle who published medical textbooks released his first collection, "Poems," in 1935; with the assistance of his first wife, editor and agent Evalyn Katz, he would go on to publish two more collections and place numerous poems in a variety of publications over the following nine years.
As the high modernism of T. S. Eliot, 1952 Poetry winner Marianne Moore and 1955 Poetry winner Wallace Stevens came to dominate the field, Shapiro forged an idiosyncratic path. Strongly influenced by the short, aphoristic lines of 1948 Poetry winner W. H. Auden ("my idol, above all others, as a modern poet," he told The Paris Review in 1986) and the spare colloquialism of 1963 Poetry winner William Carlos Williams, he was an early and ardent defender of the legacy of Walt Whitman, whose prophetic egalitarianism had fallen out of vogue in the wake of the modernist revolution.
In March 1941, Shapiro was drafted into the Army as a combat medic. Primarily stationed in Melbourne and New Guinea, he managed to complete his winning work ("V-Letter and Other Poems," which was published in 1944 and alluded to the microfilmed service that soldiers used to send correspondence home) in addition to the more polemical "Essay on Rime" (1945; a daring fusillade against the modernist establishment) during his service.
Ripe with Whitmanesque fervor, Shapiro offers trench-deep ruminations on the brutality of combat and the banality of war, as he evokes in the opening "Troop Train":
Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains,
And trains to death or trucks, and trucks to death,
Or trucks lead to the march, the march to death,
Or that survival which is all our hope;
And death leads back to trucks and trains and ships,
But life leads to the march, O flag! at last
The place of life found after trains and death—
Nightfall of nations brilliant after war.
In "The Leg," he finds a modicum of serenity in the combat experiences:
Later, as if deliberately, his fingersBegin to explore the stump. He learns a shape
That is comfortable and tucked in like a sock.
This has a sense of humor, this can despise
The finest surgical limb, the dignity of limping,
The nonsense of wheel-chairs. Now he smiles to the wall:
The amputation becomes an acquisition.
Written for Katz, the eponymous "V-Letter" is the book's emotional frontispiece, grappling with the equivocalities of wartime life:
You turn me from these days as from a scene
Out of an open window far
Where lies the foreign city and the war.
You are my home and in your spacious love
I dream to march as under flaring flags
Until the door is gently shut.
Give me the tearless lesson of your pride,
Teach me to live and die
As one deserving anonymity,
The mere devotion of a house to keep
A woman and a man.
A jury chaired by Yale University literary scholar and former Connecticut Governor Wilbur L. Cross ranked "V-Letter" alongside Auden's "For the Time Being" as the worthiest contenders for the 1945 Poetry Prize. While Cross conceded that Shapiro "has not the technical skill of Auden in versification," his expiations of "the change wrought in a man's spirit and view of life and death" ultimately compelled the Advisory Board to recommend Shapiro for the Prize. At 31, he became one of the youngest winners of any Pulitzer.
Shapiro would serve as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (the antecedent of today's poet laureate) in 1946 and, despite his lack of a degree, assumed a tenured professorship at Hopkins from 1948 to 1950. He moved on to the editorship of Poetry magazine and, after returning to academia at the University of Nebraska in 1956, played an integral role in the popularization of Prairie Schooner, the institution's influential literary journal.
The second half of his career was colored by his decision not to vote for Ezra Pound's "Pisan Cantos" as a juror on the inaugural Bollingen Prize selection committee in 1949. Although Pound was a major theoretical figure in the development of literary modernism, having collaborated with Eliot on "The Waste Land," he had embraced fascism and anti-Semitism in the years preceding World War II, culminating in his arrest on treason charges for participating in Italian propaganda broadcasts in May 1945.
Although Pound's behavior was condemned by a variety of public figures, including poet Charles Olson (a former Democratic National Committee staffer) and Senator Jacob Javits, Shapiro (who switched his vote after a ruminative night) and Katherine Chapin Biddle were the only members of the committee to go against the majority, which included Eliot, fellow modernist lodestar Allen Tate and 1966 Fiction winner Katherine Anne Porter.
While the ensuing imbroglio saw the award move to Yale from the Library of Congress, Shapiro became estranged from most of his contemporaries, who perceived themselves as working in the Poundian tradition and were keen to rehabilitate his reputation. A seemingly natural affinity for the incipient Beat movement (including a shared debt to Whitman and frank explorations of sexuality) was forestalled by vague interpersonal slights and Shapiro's controversial 1959 attestation that poetry was a "diseased art"; in later interviews, he would venomously characterize 1995 Poetry finalist Allen Ginsberg as a "politician."
In 1978, having moved on to his final academic position at the University of California, Davis, Shapiro was described as a "late U.S. poet" in a New York Times crossword puzzle; earlier that decade, the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that he had died by suicide. It was an obscurity that would endure until his death from natural causes in New York at the age of 86, leading the Academic Senate of the University of California to issue a remarkable eulogy written by departmental colleague and pioneering feminist scholar Sandra Gilbert.
"[D]espite an unwarranted eclipse in late life," she wrote, "he won his gamble for literary success. And just as importantly, despite (or again because of) his irreverence toward academic stuffiness, he was a splendid teacher for numerous classes of Davis students. [...] As we who loved him knew, after all — and as some of his more vituperative critics ought to have understood — Karl’s often comic belligerence toward the vagaries of the late twentieth-century Ivory Tower was rooted not in anti-intellectualism but in his own extraordinarily high intellectual standards, a commitment to aesthetic excellence that had shaped 'An Essay on Rime' when he was an army medic in New Guinea and that would inform the many accomplished essays and poems he produced throughout his dazzlingly prolific career."