18 pages • 36 minutes read
Karl ShapiroThe Fly
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Though Shapiro likely drafted “The Fly” before the United States declared war on Japan in December 1941, World War II informs many of the poem’s themes surrounding conflict and individual duty. World War II began in Europe around September 1, 1939, after a number of hostile invasions by Nazi Germany. Much of the Third Reich’s rhetoric and justification for the war surrounded ideas of purity and corruption of the German people. In particular, people of Jewish ancestry, Black people, Romanies, gay people, and people with disabilities were systematically rounded up and killed in service to these misinformed ideas. The practices and scale of the Holocaust were largely unknown in 1942, when “the Fly” was published. Nazi Germany’s antisemitism, however, would have likely have been common knowledge.
Shapiro—of Jewish ancestry himself—plays with many of the same themes about purity and corruption (See: Themes). Shapiro engages with these ideas in a way that makes even the most extreme cultural and genetic differences worthy of human sympathy. By showcasing the sympathies between the poem’s speaker and the fly, Shapiro demonstrates the moral and logical failures of prejudiced rhetoric. Shapiro's choice of a fly for the speaker’s antagonist might also allude to the widespread use of aircraft during World War II.
Literary Context
In the late 1910s, the formal experimentation and revolutionary poetics of the Modernists broke through into the literary mainstream. Modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote dense poetry based around theoretical frameworks. These works often foregrounded mundane scenes from everyday life and appealed primarily to an educated upper-middle class. The economic collapse of the late 1920s, in part, created tensions within the Modernist project and shifted cultural tastes.
The 1930s and early 1940s were a transitional period in American poetry. Though a small circle of dedicated poets worked on advancing Modernism in the 1930s, many American poets turned away from formal experimentation and toward more accessible work. Many poems from this time played with overtly political or historical themes. “The Fly” follows these larger trends in American poetry. Like many American poems from the 1930s and 1940s, “The Fly” employs a relatively strict formal structure (See: Literary Devices) and a consistent rhyme scheme. Despite the poem’s reliance on these structures, “The Fly” maintains the Modernist emphasis on mundane scenes and images not traditionally fit for poetry. The poem’s focus on the fly’s “maggots” (Line 16), for instance, would have been impossible without the preceding Modernists.
