Karl Shapiro Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

Karl Shapiro
How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

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

Karl Shapiro
Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, tending to make man shallow or insane.

Karl Shapiro
We ask for no statistics of the killed, For nothing political impinges on This single Casualty, or all those gone, Missing or healing, sinking or dispersed, Hundreds of thousands counted, millions lost.

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
Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

Karl Shapiro
Every war is its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.

Karl Shapiro
The proverbist knows nothing of the two sides of a question. He knows only the roundness of answers.

Karl Shapiro
Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil's had the final say.

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

Karl Shapiro
A man's house is his stage. Others walk on to play their bit parts. Now and again a soliloquy, a birth, an adultery.

Karl Shapiro
Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail
And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing
Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail And exquisite, I saw in it a thing
That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote.
It hung upon my finger like a sting.

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
One day beside some flowers near his nose He will be thinking, When will I look at it? And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply 'At what?' and he will know it's gone, O where! and begin to tremble and cry. He will begin to cry as a child cries Whose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

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
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum.

Karl Shapiro
I feel that after working a long time, I've really learned how to do what I do. I enjoy it. I don't think there's anything more satisfying than turning out a good stanza or a good piece of prose. And when you're satisfied enough, you want to show it to other people. That's called publication.

Karl Shapiro
Words like spokesman and touchstone took me completely by surprise. For very real reasons. Not only had I been out of the country when my first two books were published, but I have always been out of the country in the sense that I never had what ordinarily is thought of as a literary life, or been part of a literary group. What psychiatrists nowadays call a support system. I never had any of that and still don't.

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 didn't go to the funeral of poetry. I stayed home and watched it on television.

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
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