We live in a time when everywhere in the realm of prose Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be an eminently marketable commodity, their much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile culture. It is, indeed, their quite justified claim to have been first to occupy the Lost Desert at the center of the Great American Oasis (toward which every one now races, CocaCola in one hand, Martin Buber in the other) which has made certain Jewish authors into representative Americans, even in the eyes of State Department officials planning cultural interchanges. The autobiography of the urban Jew, whose adolescence coincided with the Depression and who walked the banks of some contaminated river with tags of Lenin ringing in his head, who went forth (or managed not to) to a World War in which he could not quite believe—has come to seem part of the mythical life history of a nation. That the youngster who was Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn become in adolescence (depending on whether you read The New Yorker or the Partisan Review) Holden Caulfield or Augie March, which is to say, J. D. Salinger or Saul Bellow Revisited surprises no one, though it leaves the best Jewish American writers amused, the second-best embarrassed, and the worst atrociously pleased!

Yet Jewish poets have not prospered in a time of cultural philosemitism as have their opposite numbers in prose. Indeed, no American poets, Jewish or Gentile, had succeeded up to the verge of the forties in projecting images of the Jew capable of possessing the American mind. To be sure, the twenties had produced the anti-semitic caricatures of Pound, Eliot, and E. E. Cummings, but these remain peripheral in their work, even Bleistein or Rachel née Rabinovich failing to achieve the authority of Sweeney or Doris. On the other hand, those pre-forties versifiers who bore Jewish names and possessed, doubtless, Jewish parents divided into two essentially inconsequential groups: the popular entertainers and upper-middlebrow Bohemians, like Dorothy Parker or F.P.A., who neither made memorable poetry nor thought of themselves as Jews; and the exponents of a joyous squalor and terror, like Maxwell Bodenheim, who seemed to the imagination of the twenties not only non-Jews but non-participants in anything except non-participation and certain hopeful counterfeits of love.

The "proletarian" literature of the thirties attracted poets from Jewish families, as Marxism in general attracted them, but their political doctrines discouraged the exploitation of Jewishness; so that the poetry section of Proletarian Literature in the United States contains the verse of a group of authors most of whom Hitler would have considered Jews but whom he had not yet persuaded that they must speak as Jews. Yet it is from a group of young men touched by Marxism, too, from a generation whose beginnings were in the dying thirties and whose consummation lay ahead in the shadow of World War II (rather than the generation able to think of itself as having fought its hard way out of the twenties, like Isadore Schneider) that the first group of poets emerged who were simultaneously committed to their Jewishness and at the center of American poetry. Needless to say, their Jewishness was for them not a piety but a problem, and they wrote for such magazines as the Partisan Review rather than for parochial publications like the Menorah Journal.

By the mid-forties, two of these had been recognized generally as among the most talented poets of the decade: Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro. In two long poems, "Shenendoah" and "Genesis," Schwartz attempted to mythicize his own life into a paradigm of the times, worked patiently at his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Jew, pursuing those alternate Messiahs, Marx and Freud, and hearing in his ear his own comic name and the grey lifeless speech of those dispossessed of one language before they had real control of another. Neither poem quite worked, although there are local successes in each; and more recently, Schwartz has abandoned along with the narrative form his first image of himself—substituting that of the assimilated Jew as Comedian, proffering himself as the Danny Kaye of verse. In his latest poetry, Christian ceremonials rather than Jewish ones become the occasions for meditation, Christmas rather than the brith. The development of Karl Shapiro is almost precisely the opposite.

Though he assures us in the introduction to Poems of a Jew that "the undercurrent of most of my poems is the theme of the Jew", he has only lately begun to make that theme explicit. The road he has traveled is indicated by the shifts in the titles of his books: Person, Place and Thing (poetry as the evocation of object and event), V-Letter (poetry as communication from a War to a scarcely imaginable place of peace), Essay on Rime (poetry as a commentary on itself, itself its own subject), Trial of a Poet (poetry as the poet's apology for his strange and treasonable vocation.) Even in the last of these volumes, whose dates are 1942, 1944, 1945 and 1947, Shapiro is still insisting "that poetry instructs language only and that its function stops there." Yet in that very volume, he includes the first and longest version of a then twenty-page poem called "Recapitulations," which is autobiographical and typical, a document rather than an exercise in linguistic purification; which is to say, it is Mr. Shapiro's "Shenandoah," a verse analogue to The Adventures of Augie March.

In Poems of a Jew which appeared in 1959 (between it and Trial of a Poet, Mr. Shapiro had published Poems 1940-1953, containing less than a dozen uncollected poems), he is quite candid about his change of heart or shift of emphasis, telling us that "It is good to read poems for their own sake, but it is also good to read them as documents. These poems are the documents of an obsession … the Jew is at its center." Oddly enough, they are for the most part the same old poems we have seen before, some of them twice over (fewer than a quarter of the poems in the latest collection had been unpublished in earlier volumes); what is new is the context established by the title, a title unparalleled in its specific declaration of allegiance since 1882 when Emma Lazarus's Songs of a Semite appeared.

What is Shapiro up to in his new grouping of old poems? Do they represent an attempt to ride beside Wouk and Salinger, Bellow and Malamud, Philip Roth and Uris—the bandwagon which travels our streets, its calliope playing Hatikvah? Or is this simply another attempt (the first was Poems 1940-1953) to keep in the public eye on the part of a poet who in the past ten or twelve years has not produced enough considerable new poetry to justify a really new volume? It pays to be frank on this score; Karl Shapiro's productivity has dwindled since the middle of the forties, perhaps because so much of his energy has been invested in his activities as editor and consultant and teacher; and the quality of his verse has tended to fall along with its quantity.

Among the comparatively few poems he has written over the last decade or decade and a half, some are merely occasional, like "Israel" or "The 151st Psalm," versifying by an established Jewish American poet called upon by his fellow Jews, who consider they have special rights in his creativity; and even the very best of his latest work (so ambitious, complex, and elegantly sensual a poem as "Adam and Eve") does not have the directness, the surety, the absolutely unique idiom, the unpretentiousness of such early poems as "Haircut," "October 1," "The Fly," or "The Twins." These will remain, with the terrible justness that baffles poets not lucky enough to grow in depth and strength, the anthology pieces by which Shapiro is remembered. None of these is included in his latest book, though the voice which says them, the eye which saw them first are the voice and the eye of that Jewish boy whose sentimental education in a Gentile world is defined by "Recapitulations," for instance, and "University," both of which are republished here.

It is the intent of Poems of a Jew to isolate the documents which illuminate that sentimental education and thus make clear what—to Mr. Shapiro—a Jew is; but to do this means in our time to cast light on a mystery in which we are all involved: "the Jew is at its center, but everyone else partakes of it." His introduction prepares us for his definition negatively only, informing us that "the Jewish question" is not Shapiro's concern, "Nor is Judaism. Nor is Jewry. Nor is Israel. The religious questions is not my concern." As a matter of fact, Mr. Shapiro wants us to believe (perhaps has to believe himself) that he not only now "views with disgust and disappointment" the "evangelism" and "the backsliding toward religion", but that he has always done so.

Yet Mr. Shapiro is essentially a religious poet, a part of whose central, even archetypal experience (along with his exposure to Marxism, his Freudian indoctrination and his war service) is an unconsummated adulterous affair with the Catholic Church. It is a final irony that in a recent special issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Mr. Shapiro was mistakenly described as an actual Catholic convert—despite a kind of self-expurgation of his earlier writing which has suppressed, for instance, the original section X of "Recapitulations" that begins "I lost my father in a dire divorce …" and goes on to describe how "I craved the beads and chains of paradise / And counted it a blessing to be blind …". In Poems of a Jew, "Recapitulations" has been retitled Five Self-Portraits I, II, III, IV, V to indicate its final shrinkage (even in Poems 1940-1953, it still had eight parts); and, indeed, it appears in what purports to be Mr. Shapiro's most Jewish collection with two of its most specifically Jewish sections excised.

Not only is X missing but also the former XVI, which is a genre picture of the kind of "Jewish" wedding imposed on non-believers by parents who cling still to traditional conformity if not orthodox faith.

The atheist bride is dressed in blue,
The heretic groom in olive drab;
The rabbi of more sombre hue
Arrives upon the scene by cab.

Since the model for this poem is Eliot's Sweeney Among the Nightingales, and since Mr. Shapiro is insisting these days first that nobody among contemporary poets has been influenced by Eliot's example, and second that Eliot's "pedantic and ironic quatrains" are both anti-semitic and bad verse—the evident affiliation must embarrass him profoundly. Yet there is no poem by Shapiro, perhaps no poem by any American poet which renders with so little sentimentality and so much just perception the sense of a Jewish religious occasion participated in by lapsed Jews. And Shapiro's ironic reversal of Eliot's ironic anti-semitism lends to the poem a special savour. One hopes that as good a piece of verse will eventually come out of Shapiro's second "dire divorce" from a father, this time a literary one!

Shapiro is, indeed, as he declares, a "heretic"—not, to be sure, a meshummed, an apostate from Israel, but one who remaining still a Jew ("God's book was in my blood") is also a Christian heretic, not unlike Baudelaire, whom he translates and who is, with Eliot, a chief influence on his earlier verse, his earlier view of himself. It would be possible to compile out of Shapiro's total body of verse a collection, quite as convincing as this one, called Poems of a Christian, which would include not only his Christmas poems ("Christinas Eve: Australia," "Christinas Tree," "To Evalyn for Christmas," "The Jew at Christmas Time") and his Sunday ones ("Sunday: New Guinea," "The Dome of Sunday"), but also "The Saint," "The Puritan," "The Convert," "Washington Cathedral," "The Confirmation," etc., etc.

It is in part the War which confirmed Shapiro's break with his home and his memories of orthodox grandparents, leaving him—as he read the Bible and chewed gum—"thinking of Christ and Christmas". But even out of the War, his year is the Christian year, his week the Christian week; he writes no poems of the Jewish Sabbath, none of Chanukah or Passover, since these festivals do not exist for his imagination. It is the Christian day of rest and the Christian holidays which move him to meditation and to verse, leaving him sometimes lulled to peace (dreaming of his children beneath their Christmas tree "like the infant Nazarene") but more often baffled and irked at the mystery of his exclusion, the exclusion of the Jew. Indeed Shapiro's very conception of the Jew is a Christian one once removed, his reaction to the reflection in the Gentile's eye which he yet accepts as a fact.

In poems in which he is not addressing himself directly to the more problematical aspects of his Jewishness and the word "Jew" occurs in casual metaphor, it carries with it the pejorative connotations of the Gentile stereotype: "He trained his joys to be obsequious Jews", "and her dreams are as black as the Jews…." Even in a much more deliberate passage (part of Poet, the final word of his first collection), Shapiro links his origins and his vocation, identifies poet and Jew in the following terms:

He is the business man, on beauty trades,
Dealer in arts and thoughts who, like the Jew,
Shall rise from slums and hated dialects
A tower of bitterness. Shall be always strange …

The image is that of Shylock, out of Shakespeare via Pound and Eliot, the image of the merchant whose real merchandise is hate. And finally in the poem called "Jew", his directest confrontation of the difficulties of defining himself, he makes it clear why in his deepest sensibility the name of his people and his fate remains a "dirty word" (he has actually written on the subject a rather unsuccessful prose poem with this title). "And the word for the murder of Christ will cry out on the air / Though the race is no more …". The verdict rendered in "Jew" is guilty as charged, and the charge the vulgarest anti-semitic accusation: "They killed our Christ!" In his latest revision, Shapiro has changed his own line to "And the word for the murder of God …", attempting to translate Christian slander to a Nietzschean boast; but this is a kind of retrospective falsification. He is misleading himself as well as his reader when he asserts in his present introduction that the "shock" of the word "Jew" ("ever a blow on our heart like a fist") has for him "nothing to do with Christ or the Crucifixion". The poems say something quite different; and even emendations will not make them lie.

I am not, of course, interested in catching Shapiro out, or in trying to prove him a worse Jew than anyone else. We are all spiritual Stalinists engaged in a continual falsification of our own histories, and we must pray for critics capable of pointing this out. It seems important to me however, to try to say (quite independently of Shapiro's own post facto interpretations) what his poems mean, since they tell a truth relevant not to his plight alone. The self-consciousness of modern Jewish Americans is typically reflexive; the Jewishness which they cannot locate finally in themselves or in Israel or in their grandfathers they discover improbably in the vestigial hostility of those who know they are not Jews with a certainty no Jew can feel these days about his identity. It is said often enough (wryly or bitterly or triumphantly) that Hitler made more Jews than God; less melodramatically, it can be added that more Jews have been made by the petty malice of some Gentile neighbor than have ever been made by the urgings of parents or rabbis or Zionist orators. All of which is a way of saying that for most moderns, Jewishness is an awareness not of belonging but of galuth, of exile or alienation. It is Shapiro's special triumph as a Jew and a poet to have defined galuth in its mid-twentieth century American form: the moment of awareness in which Bleistein realizes that he is still Shylock after all, and the secondor third-generation American that he is as alien as his remotest ancestor. The best of Shapiro's recent poems seem to me the quietest ones, in which he depicts the flowering of Jewish self-conscious not where hate confronts hate but where baffled goodwill comes up against the fact of alienation, as in "Teasing the Nuns" or "The Crucifix in the Filing Cabinet."

Yet Shapiro has apparently been searching for some more positive content with which to endow Jewishness, something beyond the wince of recognition; and this he seems to have found in the notion of Judaism as anti-asceticism. Shapiro can no more write about a Bar Mitzvah than he can about shabbes or the chanukah lights; but in his poem, "The Confirmation," he contrasts with the orthodox Christian ceremony inducting a boy to spiritual manhood ("girls in white like angels … the preacher bound in black …"), a heterodox rite de passage in which that boy masturbates "to confirm his sex … / And unction smooth as holy-oil / Fell from the vessel's level lip / Upon the altar-cloth …". The metaphors on both sides of the comparison come from Christian sources, and the divine figure which presides over the second or sexual confirmation is the Great Goddess herself in the form of a moviestar's pin-up picture; but apparently Shapiro thinks of that latter celebration of the "body self-released" as somehow intrinsically Jewish, a secular Judaism, a this-worldliness for which he pretends to find sanctions in the Old Testament. Surely he could have included the poem in the present collection on no other grounds.

This notion is carried further in the midrash, the lush poem of exegesis which he calls "Adam and Eve" and makes the conclusion of Poems of a Jew. A note tells us that the underlying images in his interpretation (which portrays the Fall as a deliberate turning from paradisal blandness through sex to the "present world" and which stars Woman) are derived from "the Zohar or central work of the cabala" and "from the renegade Freudian, Wilhelm Reich." But this means, of course, that Shapiro is attempting the kind of synthesis of a traditional mysticism (at least this time not Zen!) and a post-Freudian Fertility Cult that has attracted other Jewish American writers, beat, hip and square, from Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer to Paul Goodman and Allen Ginsberg. He is writing, that is to say, one more chapter of his long autobiographical poem, in which the latest improbable though typical conversions (from Marx to Whitman, from Eliot to Dylan Thomas, from Freud to Reich, from Christian to "Jewish" heresy) are translated into moving and sometimes subtle verse.