Creative Glut: Selected Essays - Softcover

Shapiro, Karl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566635578 ISBN 13: 9781566635578

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 2004

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position later to be known as "poet laureate"), editor of Poetry magazine―Karl Shapiro was among the commanding poets of the second half of the twentieth century, yet in many circles he is scarcely remembered today. A recent revival of interest in Shapiro has occurred with the Library of America's volume of his poems, edited by John Updike. Now, in this sparkling collection edited by Robert Phillips, Shapiro's most trenchant writings on poetry, poets, and cultural matters are once again available. They display the intelligence, power, and intellectual courage that made Shapiro one of the most important essayists of his generation. He was "a lively and slashing critic," Joseph Epstein has written, "and reading him one feels windows opening, clouds passing, sunlight, and a fresh breeze entering the room." Creative Glut contains twenty essays on such poets and writers as Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Auden, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Randall Jarrell, and on questions of poetry and American culture that Shapiro felt as urgent, including his celebrated pieces "In Defense of Ignorance" and "To Abolish Children." In all, this is a savory slice of some of the most challenging criticism of our late century.

About this title

About the Author

Karl Shapiro (1913–2000) was born in Baltimore, studied at Virginia and Johns Hopkins, and served in the southwest Pacific in World War II. He returned home with the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his second book of poems, V-Letter and Other Poems, and went on to a long and distinguished career as an American poet, writing books of poetry, autobiography, and essays (including In Defense of Ignorance, The Bourgeois Poet, White-Haired Lover, and To Abolish Children), and teaching at various universities. Robert Phillips teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and is Karl Shapiro's literary executor.

From Publishers Weekly

April may not be the cruelest month, but Shapiro may be one of T.S. Eliot’s cruelest critics. In this volume of literary reviews and personal essays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet speaks harshly of Eliot and "The Waste Land." "That it is lacking in unity is obvious," he writes. "The straight descriptive passages are weak: the section titled ‘A Game of Chess’ is one of the dullest and most meretricious of Eliot’s writings." Shapiro also skewers Eliot’s contemporary Ezra Pound, calling his oft-praised "Cantos" "a series of experiments that failed." Though perhaps unnecessarily sharp, Shapiro’s words offer a provocative assessment of writers now enshrined in the university canon. Not every essay in this 20-piece collection is negative. In his treatises on William Carlos Williams and Henry Miller, for example, Shapiro is much kinder. He calls Williams "the only modern poet who searches everywhere for new poetry" and Miller "screamingly funny." But this book—which arrives a few months after the Library of America’s reissue of Shapiro’s many verses (Karl Shapiro: Selected Poems, edited by John Updike)—lacks enough supporting material to help readers fully appreciate the poet’s critical achievements. Although Phillips’s foreword offers a broad overview, the individual essays are not introduced by any biographical or historical context. Nonetheless, Sharpiro’s well-cut prose sparkles on the page and his vigorous opinions make these literary essays exceptionally entertaining.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1566635578
• ISBN 13: 9781566635578
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368