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 obscured another element in his early work—his Southernness. In addition to these major subjects of middle-class urbanism, war, Jewishness, and love, he wrote a dozen or more poems in the 1940's that explicitly concern themselves with aspects of the Southern experience, especially as this experience clusters around the two poles of Jeffersonian social thought and Poesque psychic moods. He deals with such typical Southern topics as ancestral pride, alienation, Jeffersonian liberalism in an illiberal environment, race relations, the nature of the Southern character, and the relationship of a Baltimore poet to Edgar Allan Poe, with special attention to the paradox of being an American Jew in a Southern border state. His approach makes him no typical Southerner; he is hardboiled, analytic, satiric, experimental, and urban-oriented; and these features transform his incipient Southernness, both its rational and demonic impulses, into a much more cosmopolitan personality than the typical Southerner of our anthologies. Nevertheless, he is partly what he is in opposition to his Southern environment. (p. 35)

Of the fifty-one poems in his first book, Person, Place and Thing (1942), five express Southern themes or use Southern materials. They deal primarily with the intellectual experiences of a disillusioned young man coming to terms with two of his culture heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Edgar Allan Poe, one the political idealist who was too far above the human realities, and the other an artist who was a badly flawed neurotic. Several poems also assimilate the style of the surrealistic or grotesque in the Poe-Baudelaire tradition. Perhaps the best of these earliest Southern poems is "University." Taking a coldly clinical view of the University of Virginia, the poem expresses repulsion at the cruel code of genteel class distinctions…. (p. 36)

"Alexandria" shows a similar disenchantment with Southern culture. There are, in fact, two Souths, the old South of decayed grandeur and the new South of Washington, D.C., thriving, imperialistic, and capitalistic. The two are divided by the Potomac River but share the same polluted atmosphere…. Decadence set in early when Jeffersonian idealism failed to take root. War, racism, and capitalism replaced the great democrat's dream of justice, peace, and agrarianism…. One day his spirit will catch hold; "he shall speak"; and his ideals will replace both Souths, the shabby genteel and the imperialistic…. The poem is a surprisingly enthusiastic prophecy of the fulfillment of Jeffersonian democracy.

In these early years the presence of Poe loomed equally large, and Shapiro had to cope with his famous predecessor's influence, intellectually and artistically. (pp. 37-8)

[Shapiro himself] wrote several surrealistic, ornate poems that recall the Poe manner and parallel the Southern school of the grotesque. "Honkytonk" [for example] takes Poe's phrase Ultima Thule, an old cartographer's term meaning the "outermost region," and adapts it to a description of the "suffering junctions" of city life, those "Ghetto[es] of local sin, laughable Hell, / Night's very alley, loathed but let alone." The poem is a modernized Poesque valley of horrors: instead of a person's wandering, as in Poe's "Dream-Land," through dark subterranean paths in company with sheeted ghosts, fog-like dripping figures, ghouls, and other silhouettes of self, the lost soul here finds himself in a cheap dive in Baltimore, a moral ghetto, a psychological "Imago of Unrest, / Whose Ultima Thule" is disorder—civic, moral, and psychic. No city in the sea but a slum in a city, the honkytonk is a symbol of modern anxieties. (pp. 38-9)

Shapiro's second book, V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), is less Southern than Person, Place and Thing. It concentrates chiefly on themes of war. Nevertheless, it carries another poem on Jefferson and one called "Nigger." "Jefferson" is a tribute to Jefferson's cosmopolitanism and to the embodiment of his Renaissance ideals of beauty, knowledge, and the good life in his two great contributions to the cause of freedom: the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia. (p. 39)

Shapiro's third book of poems, The Trial of a Poet (1947), widens still further the Southern exposure of the first two books: it says more about race relations, it gives a sympathetic character study of the Southerner, and it returns to the theme of Poe….

"The Southerner" is Shapiro's most successful Southern poem. It describes how a quiet, well-mannered Southerner carries such an "authority of politeness" that when he enters a group of men around a fireplace he terminates jokes and makes everyone ill at ease. The episode stimulates Shapiro as speaker to recall his "southern evil memories," when he practiced "caste" and ingratiation. (p. 40)

The number of [Shapiro's] poems that we might call Southern is only a small part of his total output, he wrote them early in his career, and except for "University" and "The Southerner," which sometimes appear in anthologies, the other Southern poems do not measure up to his best poems about city life, war, and Jewishness, such as "Dome of Sunday," "Drug Store," "Auto Wreck," "The Phenomenon," and "The Leg." Nevertheless, this survey shows that Shapiro grew up with a feeling of kinship with Southern culture and wrote about it, especially its older Jeffersonian liberalism, and he experienced grief and chagrin to realize that Jeffersonian ideals had not taken root in his native soil. (p. 42)

Perhaps the best conclusion to draw about this evidence of Southern elements in Shapiro's works is to recognize that it reveals an unresolved tension in his creative personality in the 1940's…. His sense of justice, his Jewish compassion, his outrage at shame and hypocrisy, and, most recently, his exuberance and joy have seemed cast in ever-diminishing Southern molds. But for a while in the 1940's, he responded freely to the Southern influences in the environment of his youth. (pp. 42-3)