The first thing one notices about Karl Shpiro’s New & Selected Poems, 1940-1986 is the slimness of the volume.[1] Shapiro, who is seventy-four years old, has written some fourteen books of verse—beginning with Person, Place and Thing, published in 1942 when the author was a sergeant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, up through Love & War Art & God, which came out four years ago. This substantial body of work, most of which is unavailable, has been reduced by Shapiro to 103 pages. It is therefore no surprise that New & Selected Poems, 1940-1986 gives no sense of the scale of Shapiro’s oeuvre. What it offers instead is only an outline of the twists and turns of the poet’s interesting career. Indeed, New & Selected Poems, 1940-1986 seems to suggest that Shapiro believes the thing of fundamental interest in his career is the contours of its development.

Not that these contours are wholly without interest. Shapiro’s early poetry, written during the war, is indebted to W. H. Auden, whose influence in the United States was then at its highest point. (The early poetry of John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, two of Shapiro’s contemporaries, also owes something to Auden’s work.) The Auden that Shapiro drew from, however, isn’t the Eliot-inspired one of Poems(1930), but rather the Auden who by the mid-Thirties had abandoned the deliberate difficulty of modernism for a more accessible style and subject matter. Auden sought, through his use of the language