Karl Shapiro quotes

To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other. (Karl Shapiro)

But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

Karl Shapiro

Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?

Karl Shapiro

My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.

Karl Shapiro

Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

Karl Shapiro

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

Karl Shapiro

The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?

Karl Shapiro

As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families.

Karl Shapiro

I had never met a poet in my life before winning the Pulitzer in 1945. Well, that's not strictly true; when I went to Johns Hopkins in 1939, W. H. Auden gave a private reading to a group of special literature students, and I was one. I shook hands with him. As it happened, at that time he was my idol, above all others as a modern poet, and that experience was a very sustaining one. But I could hardly say I "knew” him.

Karl Shapiro

I was at Notre Dame just a few years ago, and one of the professors there said to me, "You don't know what effect In Defense of Ignorance had. It ripped the whole academic community in half!” I'm glad I wrote the book. I like it, and I still stand by my observations, although I wouldn't write it so violently now. I guess I really am in the Whitman tradition.

Karl Shapiro

The public has an unusual relationship to the poet: It doesn't even know that he is there. (Karl Shapiro)

Influence is strange. Because one can be influenced powerfully in every way but technique. For instance, I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner.

Karl Shapiro

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

Karl Shapiro

A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote, "And on this frail eyelash he walked," I said, "And climbed and walked like any mountain-goat."

Karl Shapiro

Then in my heart a fear Cried out, "A life - why, beautiful, why dead!" It was a mite that held itself most dear, So small I could have drowned it with a tear.

Karl Shapiro

I always had this feeling - I've heard other Jews say - that when you can't find any other explanation for Jews, you say, "Well, they are poets.” There are a great many similarities. This is a theme running all through my stuff from the very beginning. The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society's idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or troublemaker. Well, the Jews began their career of troublemaking by inventing the God whom Wallace Stevens considers the ultimate poetic idea. And so I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive - you have to at least pretend that you are "seriously” in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all. You are outside observing it.

Karl Shapiro