David Shapiro
Born in Newark in 1947, David Shapiro built a career that moved fluidly across the boundaries of poetry, literary criticism, and art history. His education took him from Columbia University to the University of Cambridge, and he went on to work as a university teacher, bringing the same attentiveness to the classroom that marked his writing across multiple disciplines.
As a poet, Shapiro worked in English throughout his life, and his critical sensibility informed not only his literary essays but also his engagement with art history — a field he pursued with the same seriousness he brought to verse. The combination was not incidental. Moving between the visual and the verbal, he sustained a body of work that required genuine fluency in more than one mode of thought. His teaching extended that range further, placing him in dialogue with successive generations of students.
Shapiro died in New York City in 2024, closing a life that had begun in Newark more than seven decades earlier. The arc from his Newark birth through his studies at two universities and into a sustained career as poet, critic, and art historian traces a course defined by disciplinary range and a commitment to working in English at a serious literary level. That he practiced three distinct intellectual crafts — poetry, criticism, and art history — across a single career remains the clearest measure of the scope he brought to his work.
Quotes by David Shapiro
Sometimes you are ahead of people and sometimes people have blind spots. They can’t see the world and they can’t see what they do.
I wanted my book to make people cry, but I feel like I’m the only person who my book is going to make cry, if they show me the sales numbers.
He's the kind of person who will get a second lease of life. He may be out now, but he's the kind of person who has a definite knack of getting people to back him.
I'm big on saving, but big institutions are not promoting savings. If one of the big money managers launched a savings fund with very low barriers, they'd have to be prepared to take a hit on profits and they don't seem ready to do that.
It's not only the stadiums that will need to be built, there's a lot of catching up to do in maintenance.
Putting pictures of kids on trucks is a great idea. The broader the reach, the more people who actually see this picture, the better the chance that someone will know that child, have seen that child or know what happened to that child.
You look at the velocity of tenants out there looking for space, and you can see it's gone up quite a bit. I think it's just a matter of time when the rates bump up.
Listed property receives rental income. It passes on nowhere the kind of growth a business might have. Listed property delivers more or less a fixed return. People buy these stocks for yields, but they do make capital growth over time.