Karl Shapiro papers

Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry and criticism. Poems, his first volume, was privately published in 1935. While serving in Australia and New Guinea from 1942 to 1945, Shapiro wrote his V-Letter and Other Poems, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as The Place of Love, which was published in Australia. His introduction to a wider audience came with the inclusion of his poems in Five Young American Poets in 1941. Influenced by W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, Shapiro produced poetry satirical of modern life, which was often experimental and never predictable.

Karl Shapiro was born Carl Shapiro in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 10, 1913, the son of Sara Omansky and businessman Joseph Shapiro. The Shapiro family moved from Baltimore to near Norfolk, Virginia, when Karl was in elementary school, then returned to Baltimore when Karl was in high school. His elder brother, Irvin, was an excellent student and earned a scholarship to the University of Virginia, where he wrote poetry. Karl Shapiro admired his older brother greatly and, following in his brother's footsteps, attended the University of Virginia in 1932. However, he stayed only a year before returning to Baltimore. In 1937, he resumed his studies at the Johns Hopkins University, where he remained until 1939. In 1940, a year after leaving Johns Hopkins, Shapiro attended the Enoch Pratt Free Library School, before being drafted into military service in 1941.

Throughout his years in the military, Shapiro continually wrote poetry. As company clerk, Shapiro had access to a typewriter, which he used to type letters and poems. Although Shapiro continued to write his poetry during this period, he was unable to contact publishers and editors and relied upon his fiancée, Evalyn Katz, to act as his literary agent.

Evalyn Katz and Karl Shapiro met shortly before Shapiro was drafted, and they eventually became engaged to be married. They began corresponding almost daily after his departure for Camp Lee, Virginia. From the outset, Evalyn was interested in Shapiro's poetry, and much of their correspondence concerns his poetry and her attempts to market it. In 1942, she moved to New York to act as Shapiro's literary agent. Her efforts resulted in the publication of Person, Place and Thing in 1942, V-Letter and Other Poems in 1944, and Essay on Rime in 1945.

A large portion of Shapiro's correspondence with Evalyn was through United States V-mail. V-mail was a method by which mail was sent to overseas military outposts during World War II. It was developed to reduce the weight and volume of armed forces correspondence to and from the United States. However, V-mail, like other wartime correspondence, was subject to censorship. V-letter forms, 8.5-by-11-inch sheets that were folded to form envelopes, were available at no cost in post offices in the United States and widely distributed to soldiers stationed abroad. After being censored, V-letters were microfilmed onto sixteen millimeter film. These films were shipped to central processing facilities in the United States and abroad where 4.25-by-5-inch facsimiles were printed. The V-letters exchanged between Shapiro and Evalyn consist of such facsimiles.

Aside from V-letters, Shapiro's nearly daily correspondence with Evalyn during the war also included letters sent by regular mail and telegrams. All of their correspondence was read by the army and subject to censorship, as Shapiro explains in Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts, Volume I: The Younger Son:

His letters contained poems which he was sending to his girlfriend in Baltimore, later in New York, where she moved to try to get them published in magazines and even in book form, both of which she succeeded in doing. His letters were read quite carefully, not for their literary value but because poems are by nature ambiguous and mysterious to say the least. So eventually as the war went on his letters were not only read by the officer-doctor assigned to censor but by departments higher up, and in the poet's case all the way up to MacArthur's headquarters.

He discovered this after the war when he looked at his girlfriend's letters from him, now that she was his wife, and they were sometimes cut to ribbons with deletions, and carried the big stamp of the Southwest Pacific Area, for as the war matured he was read more carefully. (136)

I was in the army stationed in Australia, which is where I saw Cecily Crozier's magazineA Comment in a bookstore. I though it was interesting, so I got in touch with her and we became good friends. Later, we decided to put the book together. Some of it came from the letters I wrote her. We lost touch during the later war years, and I never was able to find out what happened to her or the books. (8)