SOURCE: "The Poet's Progress," in The Nation, Vol. 156, No. 2, January 9, 1943, pp. 63-4.

In the following favorable review of Person, Place, and Thing, Schwartz determines the influence of W. H. Auden on Shapiro's poetry.

Karl Jay Shapiro is a poet of remarkable and original gifts. Yet it is possible that the topicality of his poetry—one of its strongest virtues—and the fact that the poet is now a soldier in Australia may distract attention from the literary feat performed in this book [Person, Place, and Thing]. The feat is that of taking the style of Auden and transforming it with an American subject matter, by writing of drugstores, lunch wagons, a conscription camp, a midnight show, a Buick, and many other things equally indigenous.

Most poets begin by taking fire from other poets, and most poets end, sadly enough, in self-imitation. But between the time when the poet...