This is Mr. Shapiro's fourth volume of published poetry, and in common with his previous volume, Essay on Rime, it shows him intensely preoccupied with the problem of how and what the poet should write. Considering that this problem is for him as yet unsolved, it seems a little tiresome that he should be so insistent that the solution should lie in writing like Karl Shapiro. Probably Shapiro would gain by dealing with his own problem as really his own and not every other poet's more than he gains by trying to make literary maps just at the time when his own difficulties are most obvious. Another danger for him lies in his own considerable mental power and energy which enable him to versify very effectively too many situations which are outside the one which is central to him in his present state of crisis.

Nevertheless, it is excellent that he should be in a critical and self-critical position: excellent not only for himself, but also for other poets, if and when he succeeds in getting out of the wood. In this review I shall try to indicate what I believe to be Mr. Shapiro's main strengths, weaknesses, true aims and false aims.

It is obvious that Mr. Shapiro has a considerable gift for projecting himself into dramatic situations, usually conceived in rather abstract terms. The first long poem in this volume, "Recapitulations," is autobiographical self-dramatization. The Conscientious Objector, the Southerner, the Jew, the poet who is on trial in Trial of a Poet, with his entourage of the Priest, the Doctor, the Chorus who is the Public, indicate sufficiently Mr. Shapiro's capacity for inventing Masks.

However, Mr. Shapiro seems to have imposed on himself other disciplines which often rob these figures in their dramatic situations of those sensitive and personal turns of thought which are convincing. He is in full reaction against the personal, the sensitive, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic. He is determined to be metrically and intellectually respectable, as against the shoddiness of other contemporary poets whom he compares to crabs walking backwards in their retreat from our scientific hygienic age into superstition, magic and vicious eccentricity. The combination of these aims with self-dramatization results at times in the peculiar effect of a poetry written from a very personal point of view, which has been emptied of all personality. Thus in "Recapitulations," which is an autobiographical confession, he succeeds in turning himself into a public situation, emptied of any emotion which would convince us that here we are confronted by a flesh and blood person:

This is an intellectual predicament pretending to be a person, it bears no distinguishing note to strike the eye or ear with which one can really sympathize as with another human being.

A writer who passionately identifies himself with Faust, with the Jew, the Poet, etc., must have a personality somewhere, but reading some of these poems reminds one curiously of some work by Pirandello which might be called Twenty Poems in Search of an Author. The predicament of Mr. Shapiro seems to be that whilst he has a personality which violently wants to realize itself in poetry, he also has a set of rules, largely based on a critical reaction to his contemporaries, which prevents him from doing so. One searches for this real person and suddenly finds it in occasional lines such as:

or again, in the same poem, "Demobilization":

Dimly it comes to me that this is home,
This is my Maryland, these pines I know,
This camp itself when budding green and raw
I watched in agony of shame.

Indeed, I do not wish to give the impression that Mr. Shapiro does not succeed. At times he succeeds very finely as in "Demobilization." "Homecoming" is at least a partial success, although it suffers from overstatement which is not entirely convincing:

My smile that would light up all darkness
And ask forgiveness of the things that thrust
Shame and all death on millions and on me.

Problems of overstatement such as the one that arises in these lines are important. For the problem here is one of truth. It is the problem not of the stanza and the metrical line but of the word. Not of the mot juste even but of the word which is faithful to the emotion felt which, in turn, is betrayed by any exaggeration. The fact is that smiles don't light up all darkness. However, if as well may be, the situation seems to require that the poet should invent such a smile, then he has to invent himself, he has to create his own poetic personality, he has to have the courage to be a monstrous egoist in his poetry, as Heine or D. H. Lawrence or Yeats were in theirs. You cannot eat your cake and have it even in poetry. You cannot substitute a violent, public and mechanical attitude for a vivid, convincing individual personality, through fear of lapsing into poetical incorrectitude. I could wish that Mr. Shapiro were a hundred times more the unabashed egoist in his poems. In a poem such as "In the Waxworks" where he gives us a glimpse of something monstrous in his own personality he is magnificent. In the Trial of a Poet he shows a power of organizing dramatic material and of expressing intellectual positions, but here again I find the situations mechanical.

Mr. Shapiro is a difficult poet to estimate, because whilst there are elements of technical accomplishment in his poetry which obviously command admiration, there are also elements of crudeness and insensitivity which make him vulnerable to a purist approach, and his very violence makes one uncertain of his power. Nevertheless he is a poet of rare intellectual strength, he has an exceptional power of being able to think of a poem as a single idea, and he has an interesting and perhaps passionate personality which his poetry at present partly conceals. If he were as preoccupied with the single word as he is with the stanza, he would gain enormously. At present he is too inclined to throw his words away on the wings of his stanzas. He is certainly one of the very few poets writing today whose development is an exciting subject for speculation.