SOURCE: "Karl Shapiro: The Paradox of Prose and Poetry," in The Western Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, Spring, 1954, pp. 225-44.

In the following essay, Fussell examines Shapiro's poetic development.

It is now ten years since the publication of Karl Shapiro's first important book of poems, a period long enough for the poet to have produced at least a minor corpus, a group of poems whose homogeneity and range may be taken together as representing qualities that define, in the literary historians' provocative phrase, an "early career"; a period long enough, too, for the reader to have lived with some of these poems in mind for several years, and to have been generally aware of Shapiro as a writer to be reckoned with in his thinking about the poetry immediately contemporaneous with himself. It is now as good a time as any, briefly, for a fairly thorough-going description of Shapiro's poetry...