Karl Shapiro was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 10,
1913. After graduating from high school there, he enrolled at the University
of Virginia but found that he was more interested in writing than studying and
soon withdrew. While at various jobs in Baltimore and studying on his own,
Shapiro wrote "many long poems and plays in verse, nearly all of which I
later destroyed"; the collection of shorter poems that he published in
1935 went largely unnoticed. He resumed his formal education at John Hopkins
University but was inducted into the Army before receiving his degree and
served in the South Pacific until the Second World War was over. While
overseas, Shapiro continued to write poetry, while his fiancée Evelyn Katz
(whom he married in 1945) sought successfully to get it published. His book, V-Letter,
won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1945. When he returned to civilian life,
he was well known in American letters and served for a year as poetry
consultant to the Library of Congress; he then taught at Johns Hopkins. In
1950 he succeeded Hayden Carruth as editor of Poetry magazine, a post
he held until 1956, when he joined the faculty of the University of Nebraska
and became editor of Prairie Schooner. He presently teaches at the
University of California at Davis.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, p. 316.
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ARTICLE
- 1
Selected Poems
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Cair
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