Karl Shapiro

Karl Jay Shapiro (November 10, 1913 – May 14, 2000) was an American poet.

Shapiro was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1939, he was in the U. S. Army for most of World War II. He wrote poems and sent them home to be printed during the war. V-Letter and Other Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945. He was the editor of Poetry magazine from 1948 to 1950.

He was named to be the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946. In 1948 he voted against giving Ezra Pound the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry because of Pound's anti-semitism and support for fascism during World War II. He himself won the Bollingen Prize in 1969.

Other honors were an Academy of Arts and Letters grant in 1944, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize of the Poetry Society of America.

Shapiro died in New York City in 2000.

Books
Poems (1935)
Person, Place, and Thing (1942)
The Place of Love (1943)
V-Letter and Other Poems (1944)
Essay on Rime (1945)
Trial of a Poet (1947)
Poems of a Jew (1950)
Poems 1940-1953 (1953)
In Defense of Ignorance (1960)
Prose Keys to Modern Poetry (1962)
The Bourgeois Poet (1964)
A Primer for Poets (1965)
Randall Jarrell (1967)
Selected Poems (1968)
White Haired Lover (1968)
Edsel (1971)
The Poetry Wreck (1975)
Adult Bookstore (1976)
Collected Poems, 1940–1978 (1978)
New and Selected Poems, 1940–1987 (1988)
The Younger Son (1988)
Reports of My Death (1990)
The Old Horsefly (1993)
The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)
Selected Poems (2003)
Coda: Last Poems (2008)

 Related pages 
List of poets from North America

References

Category:1913 births
Category:2000 deaths
Category:American poets