SOURCE: "Karl Shapiro: Poet in Uniform," in College English, Vol. 7, No. 5, February, 1946, pp. 243-49.

In the following essay, Kohler challenges Shapiro's reputation as a war poet, maintaining his work has a larger appeal.

The poet in uniform is at a disadvantage today. There is, first, the common reader's conception of the singing soldier, a romantic figure in the image of Rupert Brooke, whose traditional accents can glorify a cause. But, as Gertrude Stein has pointed out, there is little poetry in the mechanical destruction of modern warfare. So your poet echoes too often the noble sentiments of other men in older wars. If, on the other hand, he is interested in more than literary exploitation of the cruelties and heroism of battle, he must maintain, at all cost, his own integrity as an artist while conforming outwardly to a military ritual that is always against the privacy of...