Faith & Spirit Quote by Karl Shapiro

A good poet, Shapiro insists, is not a cosmic ambassador. He’s a specialist in attachment: the local, the particular, the stubbornly finite. “Real loves” is doing double duty here. It’s emotional advice and an aesthetic rule. Love, for Shapiro, isn’t a haloed abstraction; it’s a discipline of attention. The “realm of possibility” draws a hard border around what poetry can responsibly claim to know: bodies, rooms, streets, the daily humiliations and graces that don’t require capital-T Truth to justify them.

The barb lands in that deliberately comic image of “hold[ing] hands with God or the human race.” It’s a slap at the poet-as-prophet posture, at the urge to launder private feeling into universal revelation. Shapiro is warning against moral grandstanding and metaphysical reach dressed up as profundity. Not because God or humanity are unworthy subjects, but because “holding hands” implies an intimacy that’s counterfeit when it’s proclaimed on behalf of everyone.

Context matters: Shapiro is a mid-century American poet, writing in the long shadow of modernism and World War II, when the temptation to speak for “Man” and “Civilization” was both urgent and suspect. After mass catastrophe, big pronouncements can start sounding like evasion. His line defends a poetry of limits: not smallness, but honesty. The poet earns intensity by staying answerable to what can be touched, lost, desired, and actually lived.