"Karl Shapiro's poems are fresh and young and rash and live; their hard clear outlines, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere, of aerial perspective, but with notable visual and satiric force. The poet early perfected a style, derived from Auden but decidedly individual, which he has not developed in later life but has temporarily replaced with the clear Rilke-like rhetoric of his Adam and Eve poems, the frankly Whitmanesque convolutions of his latest work. His best poem — poems like "The Leg," "Waitress," "Scyros," "Going to School," "Cadillac" — have a real precision, a memorable exactness of realization, yet they plainly come out of life's raw hubbub, out of the disgraceful foundations, the exciting and disgraceful surfaces of existence."
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Pulitzer Prize winners20th-century poets from the United StatesJohns Hopkins University alumniJohns Hopkins University facultyPoets from Baltimore
Original Language: English
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Sources
Randall Jarrell, in "Fifty Years of American Poetry" in No Other Book : Selected Essays (1999)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Shapiro
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Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro (10 November 1913 – 14 May 2000) was an American poet, appointed as the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
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