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University

By Karl Shapiro 1913–2000 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). Copyright © 2003 by Estate of Karl Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of Wieser & Elwell, Inc.

Source: Poetry (October 1940).

Biography

Karl Shapiro's poetry received early recognition, winning a number of major poetry awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, during the 1940s. Strongly influenced by the traditionalist poetry of W. H. Auden, Shapiro's early work is "striking for its concrete but detached insights," Alfred Kazin writes in Contemporaries. "It is witty and exact in the way it catches the poet's subtle and guarded impressions, and it is a poetry full of . . .

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