[In the following review, Dupee offers a mixed assessment of V-Letter and Other Poems]

By now most readers are probably tired of war literature and would like to get back to literature. Not only is much of the writing inferior; but we are kept from saying so by reason of the censorship inflicted on us by our war-time piety. Yet in the case of Karl Shapiro, whose new poems were written during the more than two years that he has been on active duty in the Southwest Pacific, it seems impossible not to invoke the war. By what drama of adjustment has he continued writing? The question would be irrelevant, I admit, if his adjustment had resulted in a book which was continuous in thought and quality with his earlier one, Person, Place, and Thing. But although V-Letter is a remarkable performance, it is still in many ways weaker than the former book—anxious and uneven where the other one was strong and consistent.

The notable thing about Person, Place, and Thing was a firmness of mood and singleness of purpose. Its well-written satires on industrial society were not great poetry or even on their way to being that; they were in the best sense "minor." And Shapiro was able to be a successful minor poet in our time because, while renouncing the larger myth-making pretensions of modern poetry, he nevertheless maintained the modernist defiance of middleclass civilization. This ground of self-assurance is now giving way, it is clear, under pressure of the war and prolonged soldiering. His old conviction of identity is gone, and he is experimenting with new roles.

This is apparent in the introduction to V-Letter, where he tries to define his relation to the great ordeal. It must be admitted that his ideas seem contradictory. On the one hand he seems anxious to diminish the war to a mere visitation of nature and thus to conjure away its terrors considered as a political or human portent. So he says that "war is an affection of the human spirit, without any particular reference to 'values,'" and that its effect on oneself is to reduce one "in size but not in meaning, like a V-letter." But this relatively complacent view is belied by what Shapiro says of the "suffering" and "private psychological tragedy" of soldiers and even more by the drastic moral effects which he ascribes to war. It "can teach us humility," he says; and by virtue of it "contemporary man should feel divested of the stock attitudes of the last generation, the stance of the political intellectual, the proletarian, the expert, the salesman, the world-traveler, the pundit-poet [and] like the youngster in the crowd make the marvelous discovery that our majesty is naked." Those "stock attitudes," or many of them, were of course at the root of his earlier poems; and in trying to cut them away he is, knowingly, risking the extinction of his old powers. And what, one wonders, is really wrong with those attitudes? They were by-products of the same civilization that produced the war; and if, as seems more and more likely, the war fails to solve the problems that begot it, then why are not the old postures still viable? Where, moreover, are the sources of this Blake-like freshness of vision, this mystical simplicity, of which Shapiro speaks and to which he aspires? Are they to be found in battle, in the pursuit of what he calls in a poem "the rat-toothed enemy"? To accept this war as a hard political necessity is one thing; to completely de-politicalize it in the interests of a confused and supine metaphysics is to leave it a mere meaningless horror. Shapiro may be right in fleeing the old attitudes; but surely he is in danger of demonstrating that a bad civilization can finally compel acceptance of itself, or at least suspension of judgment, by the simple device of becoming worse.

These arguments apply primarily to Shapiro's introduction and not to his poetry. V-Letter is so various and so full of excellent verse that it would resist any attempt to sacrifice it to a thesis even if I wanted so to sacrifice it. The poet's peculiar negative-positive adjustment to the war has had the advantage, apparently, of leaving him relatively free to observe, read, reflect, and labor at his poetry as before. He retains his old wry pleasure in the sights of a country—in this case Australia, not America—and his characteristic interest in religion and history. Whether he is writing poetry or merely versifying—if the distinction is clear—he is as eloquent, as fertile in apt imagery, as wedded to the concrete, as he ever was. And his verse still has its clear metrical line, even though it tends toward excessive regularity and occasionally romps off into conventional dactylics.

Yet only a few of the poems in V-Letter seem to me equal to the average of his earlier work. The best single production in the book is probably "The Synagogue," one of a series of satiric-prophetic pieces on Judaism. The subject is the spiritual limitations and historical guilts of the Jewish religion as Shapiro conceives them; and although his point of view is Christian, his temper is that of a Jewish prophet censuring the Jews. To readers not similarly concerned, Shapiro's ideas in these poems may seem atavistic; but they clearly exercised to the utmost his faculties as a poet. In "The Synagogue" passion and intellect converge to form one of the great contemporary poems. There is, however, seldom such concentration of forces in the rest of V-Letter. For the most part the great ironies and paradoxes of the war escape the satiric comment which other and lesser aspects of modern society received in Person, Place, and Thing. Shapiro now reserves his thunder for Judaists and intellectuals. When he writes of military life, as in "Troop Train" or "Elegy for a Dead Soldier," he is easy, reportorial, readable; hardly any other poet today could have produced so colloquially-spirited, so tragically-gay a departure scene as he depicts in the first stanza of "Birthday Poem." Nevertheless it is curious how often these poems drop into commonplace or even mere folksy sentiment. ("I see you woman-size And this looms larger and more goddess-like Than silver goddesses on screens"—I love you just the way you are, dear.) And it appears that Shapiro's former satirical defiance is being displaced by new and vaguely disturbing attitudes. There is in his work a growing contempt for conscious artistry and intellect, an eagerness to present himself as passionately immersed in the folk life of the soldier, a pride in his acquired toughness.

I smoke and read my bible and chew gum…
I'd rather be a barber and cut hair
Than walk with you in gilt museum halls…

And on through crummy continents and days,
Deliberate, grimy, slightly drunk, we crawl,
The good-bad boys of circumstance and chance…

Nor are these new feelings frankly examined in the poet's conscience in such a way that the conversion process becomes itself the subject of his poetry: they are merely taken for granted. It would certainly be an irony of the war if it turned a complex and specialized poet like Shapiro into only another exponent of hard-boiled sentimentality.