This book may very well be the most remarkable contribution to American art yet to have come out of the war. Its title may suggest to the general reader a bookish piece by a young man growing up in a library and steeped in the period of Boileau and Pope. It happens to have been written by a sergeant in the Medical Corps who was just completing his third year of active duty in the Pacific. When Karl Shapiro was drafted in the spring before Pearl Harbor, his name was probably known only to readers of "New Directions" and the serious little magazines. He was already in New Guinea before his first book, Person, Place and Thing, was published. He was finishing this Essay in the Netherlands East Indies a year ago, before he had had any chance to realize that his V-Letter had placed him, among younger readers particularly, at the forefront of the poets of his decade.

Composed without access to books, this verse Essay of over 2,000 lines discusses "rime" in its widest connotation as synonymous with "the art of poetry," and gives a detailed assessment of that art in our time. It is the kind of production one would hardly have believed possible in the special circumstances of soldiering, and yet without the enforced isolation from everything he cared most about and without the equally enforced inwardness of his thoughts Shapiro might never have felt the necessity to take stock of where we now stand "in the mid-century of our art." What makes the result such exciting reading is that here we have no formal estimate, with measured dependence upon authority. We have rather the direct statement of what a poet really knows and believes, what he has absorbed from thirty years of living and ten of learning his craft.

Shapiro is no eclectic, and makes no attempt to include all the leading names in modern poetry. In a closing passage he regrets that he had to leave out certain figures, notably Wallace Stevens and Frost, since he lacked "a whole opinion of their work." Yet he gives a representative picture of the prevailing influences of his particular period, of the state of poetry as it has been experienced by someone who began to practice it in the early Nineteen Thirties. He has written thereby a chapter of cultural and moral history. But he has also written a poem. He has not availed himself of the technical virtuosity displayed in his previous books. In deliberately roughening his blank verse to the "flux and reflux of conversation," he may have produced some needlessly flat lines. But his language is vivid with the eloquence of conviction, and he enlivens his effect with an occasional tightening rhyme. He does not engage in abstract analysis. He knows the difference between a poet and a semanticist, and, as he says, his wish

The poets of his time who have made the most impression upon him are Eliot, Hart Crane and Auden. Shapiro followed the Nineteen Twenties in recognizing Eliot to be the master craftsman of American poetry. In 1933 Hart Crane, who had responded deeply to Eliot's technical innovations but had attempted to refute the disillusion of The Waste Land by a new affirmation of Whitman's America, had recently killed himself in despair. Auden, who had also learned much from Eliot, was just starting to express political and social concerns very different from anything articulated in Ash Wednesday. With the depression had come a marked break in the sequence of American poets. Between 1910 and 1930 this country had witnessed the emergence of a greater abundance and variety of poetic talents than in any previous period in our history. But during the Thirties most of our new writers turned to prose, particularly to the novel of social protest. The new signatures in poetry, with an occasional exception like Delmore Schwartz at the end of the period, were predominantly English.

Shapiro does not agree with Yeats' opinion that since 1900 there have been "more poets of worth" in the English language than in any generation since 1630. He indicates his persistent view by arranging his Essay under three headings, "The Confusion in Prosody," "The Confusion in Language," "The Confusion in Belief." He writes with modesty, as one involved with his own age, but also with great firmness. His opening section is the most technical in its references, the most unusual to have been created entirely from memory. Living in the period of the breakdown of formal metric, he takes stock of how and when that came about. He discusses what he has learned of the resources of the past from three monuments of scholarship, Bridges' study of Milton, Lanier's Science of English Verse and Saintsbury's account of prose rhythms.

From his own immersion in the poets Shapiro has found the "discipline" of Milton's prosody to be the practitioner's "purest guide" to mastery. Only those aware of the acrid academic debates of recent years will recognize Shapiro's catholicity in being able to admire Milton's supremacy, and yet to assert that "by far the two great prosodists of our age" are Joyce and Eliot. Academic critics have usually lined up on one edge of that divide, current readers on the other. Shapiro does not argue. He knows as a poet, through the evidence of his ears, that in Eliot "the triumph of a new form is certain." He has many fresh things to say about that triumph. He is a judicious appraiser of the artesian interflow that Eliot struck anew between French and English verse; but he values Eliot even more for the way his "clean conversational voice" cut through "the late-Victorian lilt." Measuring his words carefully, Shapiro remarks of the metric of Ash Wednesday that

He is even more penetrating in his treatment of Joyce. He reckons with Ulysses as "a thing of rime entirely," since he believes that it established "a new rhythmical idiom" through the mating of the possibilities of verse and of prose, such as Lanier and Saintsbury foresaw. But Shapiro is by no means easy in his mind about the influence of Joyce's intricacy. He is aware that the master has fallen into the hands of cultists and has fathered many aberrations. But in summation of the vagaries of our time Shapiro recognizes that it has also been marked by much "serious invention," as poets have struggled to find possible verse forms to fit the "tensile strains" in modern speech.

Confusion in language is of even graver import, since language is the living record of our moral history. Shapiro believes that excessive style is an undeniable sign of disequilibrium, and he is disturbed by the violently diverse phases through which so many of our artists have gone in the age of Picasso and Stravinsky. Auden's is the case history of multiple personality in verse, and Shapiro notes Auden's pursuit through the whole "lexicon of forms" after "the lost Eurydice of character." But he is by no means forgetful of the immense stimulus to his own development from Auden's mastery of rhetoric. His passage on the advent of Auden's group recaptures the excitement of that moment when

He has high praise for the concrete vocabulary of immediate things that was thereby inaugurated, but is equally critical of Auden's subsequent deflection into loose abstraction.

An especially perceptive passage probes farther the effects of abstract rhetoric induced by our poets' adoption of an international style. Shapiro cites Pound's "polyglot" Cantos as one symptom, and as another the curious influence of such translations as Spender's Rilke and the various versions of Lorca, which were then imitated as new idioms. The result was to make much current verse read like a translation "where no original exists," and the end-product, in a characteristic writer like MacLeish, has the unreality of "a linguistic dream."

The confusion, or rather the failure in belief, is introduced by an estimate of the poet whose talent, in Shapiro's view, was greater "than any, excepting the expatriates," since Whitman's:

Crane died for modern rime, a wasted death,
I make the accusation with the right
Of one who loved his book; died without cause.
Leaped from the deck-rail of his disbelief
To senseless strangulation. When we shall damn
The artist who interprets all sensation,
All activity, all experience, all
Belief through art, then this chief suicide
May be redeemed.

Crane is the symbol of the most dangerous fallacy in recent art, the substitution, as traditional faith collapsed, of a frenzied and catastrophic belief in art itself as "the supreme criterion of experience." Other substitute beliefs have been rife in our age, and Shapiro traces their progression from the Darwinian poet of progress to the Marxist poet of revolution. He understands why the political faith of so many of the young radicals of the past decade collapsed so quickly. They staked everything upon the immediate fulfillment of their Utopian dream, and when that failed them, their belief failed too. Shapiro reminds us of what our professional patrioteers would now like us to forget, that most of our young writers faced the beginning of the war with little positive conviction. He holds, with quiet discernment, that

The rime produced by soldiers of our war
Is the most sterile of the century.

Shapiro is possessed by a very different mood from those prevailing at the close of the last war. He feels neither liberated nor disillusioned. He is inescapably conscious of the consequences of our trying to live in a "structural universe" which

Has neither good nor evil but only true
And false.

He holds that man is by nature "a believing being," and, in a period of excessive and distracted intellectualism, he also holds that the writer is responsible for putting his own emotions in order. He does not indicate his own particular position, but it is evident here, as it was in V-Letter, that Shapiro is increasingly preoccupied with religious values. The only recent poet who has impressed him by the integrity of his concern with faith is Eliot.

The recurrent and concluding aim of the Essay is to solidify "the layman's confidence in a plainer art." Shapiro maintains that our complex styles, however brilliant, have brought upon us an unprecedented cleavage between poet and audience. He thereby raises again the familiar complaint, but he gives to it no conventional answer. He is fully aware of the difficulties confronting a true popular art in a period so equipped with all the instruments of vulgarization. His respect for his craft alone would make him realize that the pseudofolksy verse carried by the slick picture magazines, whether called "Corn" or "My Country," is no poetry at all. Shapiro would also stand with Farfell in warning against the incalculable corruption already wrought upon public taste by Hollywood.

But the sure fashion in which he threads his way through such a maze of horrors is a token of his belief in a continuing American tradition. His treatment of Whitman is significant, since he returns to him in all three sections. He declares that the metric of "Leaves of Grass" is,

since it freed us from what was "fake and effeminate" in our imitation of the forms of Europe. But Shapiro also recognizes how flaccid Whitman's free verse can be, and thinks that most of his descendants in our day reflect "but poorly on the prototype." So too with Whitman's language and belief. Vital as it is in its concrete notations, "the wide style of the dry Americana" is a very misleading model when it falls to mere generalizations about Democracy, Ma Femme. The poet of "person, place and thing" had already pronounced "the word 'America'" to be "the chief enemy of modern poetry." He reinforces what he meant by showing how one of Whitman's abstractions, that of the Perfect State, has become the "optic illusion of our time." It has begotten many swollen epics filled, not with the dramatic tensions of living men and women, but with the bloodless abstractions of "the synthetic myth." Thus Shapiro affirms his central conviction that a poem is not the same kind of construction as a philosopher's system or a political theorist's dialectic:

Therefore, despite his response to Whitman's continuing greatness, Shapiro remarks that Poe was

He might have made his meaning less mistakable if he had said Baudelaire, since his concern is to point up the opposition between poetry as craftsmanship and poetry as Weltanschauung. Shapiro finds his clearest clue out of the maze by following another substitute belief, that of the Freudian poet, to its dead end. He cites Freud's own final disavowal of psychoanalysis as a Weltanschauung and his description of the arts as "beneficent and harmless forms." Instead of being dismayed at the reduction of the arts to such a humble status, Shapiro declares:

This is the sane perspective, one that brings
The beloved creative function back to scale.

In denying I. A. Richards' claim that "poetry can save us," in affirming that all great art must have its tap-root in adequately human moral values, Shapiro would seem to have established a solider "hope for poetry" than that expressed a decade ago by Day Lewis. The best of Shapiro's own poems so far, ranging with gusto from tenderness to irony to stinging satire, would already augur his important share in bridging the gap between the poet and the democratic audience of the Nineteen Fifties.