Few poets in America today have gone through as many transformations of style or as many varieties of subject matter as Karl Shapiro. Beginning as a modern formalist, he later renounced this work as "trash basket" poetry and went on to write free verse paragraphics; recently he returned to traditional songs and sonnets. Among our major poets today, only Robert Lowell has had more success with a similar triple shift from cerebral to visceral to cerebral verse. Just as striking are the varied configurations of Shapiro's major themes. He began as the poet of urban middle-class America, went to topics of war, eventually stressed the Jewishness of his work as its dominant "undercurrent," returned to an assessment of our bourgeois culture, and finally, in his first really happy book, he revelled in the joys of conjugal love.

Not surprisingly, these larger configurations of style and theme have totally...