(Editors’ Note.—In the “Note and Acknowledgment” appended to the Essay, Shapiro gives thanks
to William Van O’Connor
For many helpful comments and the use
Of several of his studies. … )
It is quite possible that the Essay on Rime will one day be studied, much as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as a formal recognition in our time that one age is done and another is beginning. It is appropriate that Karl Shapiro should have written it for in his poetry the modern idiom has become natural, easy, supple—distinctively of our time. For some years now it could be seen that modern poetry had broken with most of its immediate past. There have been multiple forms of experimentation, erudition, theatrics, obscurity, and the rest. But in England there has been Barker and in America Shapiro, both of whom have introduced idioms, indebted to the periods of experiment, that are free from most of the excesses brought about by the poetic revolution. The modern idiom has now achieved a simplicity under adult control. That much of the stiffness has gone out of language used in poetic structures might be exhibited in the examination of several young poets, but in none, perhaps, so readily as in Shapiro. It is appropriate therefore that he should publicly examine his art. The forces that have worked to form the modern mind have not resolved themselves— they have developed to a point, however, where certain of their effects on modern poetry are observable.
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