Steve Sailer writes: World War II poet Karl Shapiro wrote this poem about his one semester at the U. of Virginia in the 1930s:
University
BY KARL SHAPIRO
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum. In mid-September
The entering boys, identified by hats,
Wander in a maze of mannered brick
Where boxwood and magnolia brood
And columns with imperious stance
Like rows of ante-bellum girls
Eye them, outlanders.
In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace,
Under the arch, and lofty banister,
Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass;
The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet”
And visitors on tiptoe leave
For the raw North, the unfinished West,
As the young, detecting an advantage,
Practice a face.
Where, on their separate hill, the colleges,
Like manor houses of an older law,
Gaze down embankments on a land in fee,
The Deans, dry spinsters over family plate,
Ring out the English name like coin,
Humor the snob and lure the lout.
Within the precincts of this world
Poise is a club.
But on the neighboring range, misty and high,
The past is absolute: some luckless race
Dull with inbreeding and conformity
Wears out its heart, and comes barefoot and bad
For charity or jail. The scholar
Sanctions their obsolete disease;
The gentleman revolts with shame
At his ancestor.
And the true nobleman, once a democrat,
Sleeps on his private mountain. He was one
Whose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad;
This school he held his art and epitaph.
But now it takes from him his name,
Falls open like a dishonest look,
And shows us, rotted and endowed,
Its senile pleasure.
Karl Shapiro, “University” from Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2003).
* He should’ve stopped after the first line – the rest was superfluous.
* I get the impression that Karl Shapiro didn’t get laid during his one semester at UVA.
In fairness, a lot of universities and colleges were like that in the old days; snooty and condescending and members of the DAR and all that. The democratizing of higher education came later, probably after WW2.
Shapiro’s poem is of a genre of outsider literature that I am tired of reading, to be honest. It sums up, in free verse, the text of a thousand blog posts by young Asians, African Americans, women, LGBT’s, etc. who are all trying to make a career for themselves by describing the ineffable pain they suffer by being different. There’s a certain navel gazing and self-pitying quality that I just can’t appreciate anymore.
I was raised — this is hardly unique — to believe that there was a Western Canon in culture, the arts, and philosophy, and if I wanted to be an educated member of society I had to be familiar with this. Some Ivy League colleges, e.g., Columbia, still promote the idea, that’s why you get minority students whining about reading the Iliad every year.
But one of the things I’ve noticed about the left in recent decades is not only do they not have that broad cultural education, they have no respect for such education, because, after all, that past was sexist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, you name it. They seem to have no conception of traditional high culture at all, but the most worrisome consequence is that they have no way of knowing that their specific attitudes as well as their grievances have been discussed before, usually by far more intelligent and insightful artists and writers.
I have no problem with outsiders. It’s not that uncommon a syndrome. And outsiders can frequently provide fresh and interesting insights. Unlike this poem.
* That is not a poem; it’s silly prose that makes little to no sense.
* I’m always amazed at how bad Jews are at Poetry. Great Novelists, screenwriters, and dramatists. But poetry seems to be a bridge too far.
I’m sure Shapiro disliked U of VA in 1939 cause of all the gang rape. You just have to read the poem more closely.
* This dude really needed a safe space.
* It seems a sub-category of the Jewish ethnic animus genre. They could just have a stamp that says “Jewish ethnic animus” or “Similar to Jewish ethnic animus” and we’d all save a lot of time.
* Some people like me went to college for the education. Others go because college is supposed to be their ladder into American’s upper class with all the money and power that implies. When these people meet a wall they can’t break through, thwarted ambition makes them rage like Karl Shapiro.
Frankly, a guy from a tightly knit in-group like Shapiro has no right to fume about another tightly knit in-group not letting him in. It also says something about a man whose greatest ambition in life is to gate-crash an in-group. He doesn’t want to accomplish something of material value in life, rather, he just wants to know the right people. It’s as if without their approval, he thinks he has no value at all. I see a person like this as being the bowing, scraping, beta male courtier always revolving with a ring of his prancing beta-ilk around a kingly WASP-type figure, and they’re ecstatic to be this guy’s servant. Sort of like Huma Abedin, actually.
* Shapiro grew up in Baltimore and, after leaving UVA, transferred to Johns Hopkins, so perhaps homesickness played a part in his sense of alienation/resentment. I don’t guess I have to add that people who go on to become poets tend to take the routine abrasions and disappointments of life VERY personally.
“Show me a poet, and I’ll show you a shit.”
–A.J. Liebling
* At least in Russian language, Jews are among the best poets: Mandelstam, Pasternak, Brodsky.
* Counter Points: Heinrich Heine, Paul Celan.
