Karl Shapiro, the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, was the son of Joseph and Sarah Omansky Shapiro. The Russian Jewish Shapiros were perceived as outsiders in the American South. Shapiro had a typical middle class Jewish upbringing.and in the 1930s travelled to Tahiti, worked in his father's business and explored both Communism and Catholicism. In 1935 Shapiro privately published Poems, winning him a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, which he attended from 1937 to 1939. He never completed a degree and eventually studied librarianship at the Enoch Pratt Library School in Baltimore. Shortly before his examinations in 1941 he was drafted into the United States army and inducted in March 1942. The sterility of military life enabled him to write; between 1941 and 1945 he turned out four volumes of poetry as well as having a poem published in Five Young American Poets: Second Series (1941).
Shapiro was posted to the South West Pacific as a sergeant in the U.S. Army Medical Service in early 1942. He was to spend three years in Australia, New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies. His first stop was Melbourne where, in a poem of that name, he observes a typically urban scene: 'At five o'clock the pubs roar on the world And milk bars trickle pardon, as the mobs Lunge, worse than Chicago, for the trains Dispersing life to gardens and to tea'. Yet he reminds us that 'This was a land Laid for the park of loneliness of Earth, And giant imagination and despair. Who reared this sweet metropolis abides By his own error, more profound than war.' Shapiro eagerly contacted Australian writers and came across the avant-garde Melbourne magazine, Comment. He referred to it as 'a shot in the arm of a dying, fainting, failing Yank' and started publishing his poetry in it. The magazine's editor and financial backer, Cecily Crozier, (q.v.) was soon editing a book of his letters and experimental poetry. A Place of Love was published by Crozier later in 1942 and banned by some Australian bookshops because of its explicit love poetry. By this stage Shapiro had been transferred to Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains and made contact with Clem Christesen (q.v.). He may also have met Eleanor Dark (q.v.) at this time; they had an extensive correspondence. He referred to Meanjin Papers as 'one of the three or four really stimulating magazines in Australia'. Christesen and Shapiro met briefly in Brisbane on the 28 February 1943 while Shapiro was in transit to New Guinea. Christesen published several of his poems in Meanjin Papers. In A Place of Love Shapiro writes of this time: 'I plucked the Bougainvilia In Queensland, in time of war; The train paused at the station And I reached it from my door' (67).
Shapiro was already in Australia when his first book of poems, Person, Place and Thing appeared in 1942 and won the Levinson Prize. Shapiro was never a conventional war poet and in the introduction to V-Letter and Other Poems which won the Pulitzer Poetry Prize in 1944 he states his credo: 'Since the war began, I have tried to be on guard against becoming a "war poet"...It is not the commonplace of suffering or the platitudinous comparison with the peace, or the focus on the future that should occupy us; but the spiritual progress or retrogression of the man in war, the increase or decrease in his knowledge of beauty, government and religion....We learn finally that if war can teach anything it can teach humility; if it can test anything it can test externality against the soul.'
'V-Letter and other Poems (1944) made Shapiro an instant celebrity in the United States. The volume was written while he was based in Australia and New Guinea. The poems were sent to Shapiro's fiancee, Evalyn Katz for editing and publication. 'V-Letter' referred to the letters from abroad written by American servicemen, sent to the United States on microfilm and reprinted in smaller formats (V-Letters) for mailing. A number of the poems reflect his time in Australia: 'Hill at Parramatta', 'Sydney Bridge' and 'Christmas Eve: Australia'. Shapiro's last volume of the war written in the jungles of New Guinea was Essay on Ryme, published in the United States on 30 October 1945 after his discharge from the Army in July. In it he comments: 'The rime produced by soldiers of our war Is the most sterile of the century.'
Shapiro never returned to the South Pacific unlike his compatriot, Harry Roskolenko (q.v.), a fellow poet. Perhaps Shapiro had a more assured path to literary recognition in America, becoming Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1947-48, pursuing an academic career and editing several poetry journals. Both had considerable impact on the wartime Australian literary scene with A. D. Hope (q.v.) describing their poetry as 'novel, strange, exciting and assured.' Max Harris (q.v.) saw them as part of the 'Reportage School' of modern poetry permeated by sociological reflections. He observed that: 'their reportage is successful when it emerges through the brazier of sharply personal language rather than personal vision.' Shapiro's poetry of the war years made him one of the outstanding poets of his generation, uniting a modernist sensibility with close observation of commonplace subjects. O'Connor sees the significance of his wartime experience in this way: 'In committing himself to the life of the enlisted soldier he came to understand the American male-and therefore the American mores-in a way that would have been denied him had he clung to the cold principles of his early Marxist position.' (76).
(Patricia Clarke, 'An American Poet Finds Australia', NLA News 14.9 (June 2004): Patricia Clarke, 'Literary Sidelights on Wartime Brisbane', Queensland Review, 11.2 (December 2004): 41-57; Kohler, Dayton, 'Karl Shapiro: Poet in Uniform', College English 7.5 (February 1946): 243-249; Ross Labrie, 'Karl Shapiro, November 10, 1913-.', Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, Second Series. Ed. by Peter Quartermain (1986): 399-405; Harris, Max, 'Commentary on Australian Poetry', Voices 118 (Summer 1944); O'Connor, William van, 'Karl Shapiro: The Development of a Talent', College English 10.2 (November 1948): 71-77)
