For an American poet of Shapiro's generation—that of Jarrell and Schwartz and Lowell and Berryman and Roethke—survival is quite a feat. His progress …, which entailed at various points revolts against formalism and academicism (the exigencies of "rime," T. S. Eliot, the Eastern critical establishment, the Englishness of the English language, and so forth), turns out to be a good thing, hygienically speaking. And it hasn't even lost him points as a poet. For the very latest [groups of poems] included in [Collected Poems: 1940–1978], Adult Bookstore, has some of the most sharply observed, satirically barbed and muscularly formed poems he has ever written. There is also here a stunning battle poem about the death of the great Japanese warship, The Yamoto, in April, 1945. It's laid out something like a Victorian ode (viz., Tennyson's stanzas on the death of the Duke of Wellington) and even more recalls the great defeatist poems of the Anglo-Saxons, "The Battle of Brunanburgh" in particular…. (p. 235)

Only Louis Coxe has written verse of comparable force about Pacific naval warfare during World War II.

What a relief to deal with a poet fully energized, whose virtues depend not at all upon canting back-reference to The Tradition, or the wan and feeble splendors of "reflexivity." Reading Shapiro we begin to believe again that modern poems can be about subjects other than themselves, that poets are not of necessity condemned to the perpetual effort to fly up their own fundaments.

"The Dome of Sunday," given pride of place in the first collection, Person, Place and Thing, evokes the dying fall of the American Thirties with a steady intensity. There is the hard clear Hopperesque light shed evenly on the "row-houses and row-lives" of Baltimore, the alienated observer behind his single "plate glass pane," the final shattering of the dome—of bourgeois smugness and selfish security—conveyed as wish only, yet pointing presciently towards Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941…. (p. 236)

[Then there is] "Scyros," Shapiro's much-anthologized bravura piece on the theme of universal-apocalyptic war cum conscription…. Despite the rackety Louis MacNeice touches, or perhaps because of them, the poem after three and a half decades stands with the best lyrics inspired by the grotesqueries, if not the pity, of World War II. To remind the reader that Shapiro's first collection also contained "The Fly," "Hospital," "Necropolis," and "My Grandmother," naming just a few, is automatically to recall what an extraordinary debut this street-smart young poet of harsh wit, devouring curiosity, and elaborate technical facility enjoyed.

The next three collections, from V-Letter and Other Poems to Shapiro's first collected edition, Poems, 1940–1953,… are taken up with the matter of war and the dismal Cold War stultification which followed. With Lowell and Jarrell, Shapiro is the major poetic witness of that war, inferior to Lowell in the rhetoric of outrage and resistance, to Jarrell in poignancy, but much superior to both for taking in what actually went on. His generation were rudely awakened from the bitter doze (daze?) of the Thirties, had a global consciousness rudely thrust upon them, so to speak. This is what Shapiro's strongest poems, from "Troop Train" through the bold, outrageous, crammed observations of "Melbourne," and the arrayed incongruities of "Sunday: New Guinea," to the high Yeatsian rhetoric of "Elegy for a Dead Soldier" permanently record…. [In] "V-Letter" he tried to write his generation's essential poem of love and courtship amid the immense, depersonalizing desolation of the far-flung holocaust. If the attempt was too ambitious, leading to oversimplification of thought and feeling played off against somewhat overblown technical display, there was nothing over-simple or overdone in the way it opened…. (pp. 236-37)

It's always a little unsettling, what Shapiro sees, with his cult of staring, habit of looking out and at, rather than swivelling the eyes around to look inside, chewing his own heart. That is not to claim he misses the metaphoric character of events. (p. 237)

[The curious works of The Bourgeois Poet] stand apart from the modern tradition of the prose poem stemming from the symbolists (Mallarmé et alii) in that they lack richness of connotation and metaphor. Typically they are neat and boxy on the page, quite joky and opinionated in content, enabling the poet to interview himself on a wide variety of subjects and moods, to move rapidly and restlessly around in his own rather agitated field of consciousness. Shapiro grandly ignores Pound's famous behest, "Don't be viewy." And as for another E. P. dictum, that poetry should be at least as well written as prose, the problem gets turned on its head. Are [his] prose poems as well written as Shapiro's best verse? I should say, on the whole, not at all…. (p. 238)

[When] the subjects and the thoughts are almost invariably more interesting than their expression in words we may surmise that something other than poetry is being worked and pass on to the reconfirmation of Shapiro's poetic worth provided by the later collections, Selected Poems (1968) and Adult Bookstore.

These poems revert to the earlier manner of strong wit and strong form but there is a new easiness and lift that may result from kicking over the traces in mid-career. He uses his memory more and writes about himself without much vanity or self-consciousness…. In a special award category is "Sestina: of the Militant Vocabulary," which sends up the cant of the Sixties by going round and round with the words relevant, experience, revolution, pigs, power structure, and Establishment.

Let's end with "Manhole Covers." A lifetime of devotion to a craft and of reflection on what modern poetry in English is and can be has gone into its apparent ease and casualness of manner, its free movement. The cadences may owe something to the Whitman-influenced Lawrence of the "Unrhyming Poems," but the achievement is Shapiro's own. He is the real thing, and not something dreamed up by academic circles…. (p. 239)