SOURCE: "Alchemy or Poet," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LIV, No. 4, October-December, 1946, pp. 684-90.

In the following essay, Richman deems Essay on Rime confused, unconvincing, and ultimately unsuccessful.

The danger in Karl Shapiro's Essay On Rime is that the three arguments seem convincing. It seems that modern poetry does not exist; yet after reading this rule-making, one realizes that the poetry of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Crane and Pound still exists large and strong even though Mr. Shapiro renounces it. The blame he laid on modern poetry, I am convinced, was not its but man's.

The Essay seems convincing because many of the observations, and particularly much of the appreciations, are good and significant. But Mr. Shapiro has made pretensions for this work which go beyond the organic need and seed of the type of essay he has written. And, though this is a difficult statement to...