Shapiro wrote poetry in the Pacific Theater while he served there as a United States Army company clerk during World War II.

Throughout the conflict, he engaged in near-daily correspondence with his fiancée and first wife, Evalyn Katz (m. 1945-1967), who moved to New York City to act as his literary agent in 1942.

Poems from his earlier books display a mastery of formal verse with a modern sensibility that viewed such topics as automobiles, houseflies, and drug stores as worthy of attention.

The poet early perfected a style, derived from Auden but decidedly individual, which he has not developed in later life but has temporarily replaced with the clear Rilke-like rhetoric of his Adam and Eve poems, the frankly Whitmanesque convolutions of his latest work.

[7]In his later work, he repudiated the epochal influence of Ezra Pound (whom he voted against in the inaugural Bollingen Prize deliberations in 1949, citing the poet's antisemitism) and T.S.

[8] However, Morris Dickstein would later opine that his "maverick role seemed strictly literary" vis-à-vis the alternative lifestyles of such Sixties "culture heroes" as Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg.

[11] His other works include Person, Place and Thing (1942), the libretto to Hugo Weisgall's opera The Tenor (1950; with Ernst Lert), To Abolish Children (1968) and The Old Horsefly (1993).

[5] In 1985, Richard Tillinghast of The New York Times Book Review asserted that Shapiro had become "more a name than a presence," and he obtained a settlement from the American Medical Association after the organization "mistakenly included him in a list of writers who had committed suicide.