• Jeanette S Davis Prize and Levinson prize, both from Poetry in 1942
• Contemporary Poetry prize, 1943
• American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1944
• Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, 1944, 1953
• Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1945, for V-Letter and Other Poems
• Shelley Memorial Prize, 1946
• Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress (United States Poet Laureate), 1946-47
• Kenyon School of Letters fellowship, 1956-57
• Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, 1961
• Oscar Blumenthal Prize, Poetry, 1963
• Bollingen Prize, 1968
• Robert Kirsch Award, LA Times, 1989
• Charity Randall Citation, 1990
• Fellow in American Letters, Library of Congress

Poetry

• Adult Bookstore (1976)
• Auto Wreck (1942)
• Collected Poems, 1940-1977 (1978)
• Essay on Rime (1945)
• New and Selected Poems, 1940-1987 (1988)
• Person, Place, and Thing (1942)
• The Fly (1942)
• Place of Love (1943)
• Poems (1935)
• Poems 1940-1953 (1953)
• Poems of a Jew (1950)
• Poet: Volume I: The Younger Son (1988)
• Selected Poems (Random House, 1968)
• Selected Poems (Library of America, 2003), edited by John Updike.
• The Bourgeois Poet (1964)
• The Old Horsefly (1993)
• The Place of Love (1943)
• Trial of a Poet (1947)
• V-Letter and Other Poems (1945)
• White Haired Lover (1968)
• The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late (1998)
• Coda: Last Poems (2008)

Autobiography

• Reports of My Death (1990)
• Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1988-1990)

Essays

• The Poetry Wreck (1975)
• To Abolish children and Other Essays (1968)
• A Primer for Poets (1965)
• In Defense of Ignorance (1960)
• Randall Jarrell (1967)
• Start With the Sun: Studies in the Whitman Tradition, with James E. Miller, Jr., and Bernice Slote (1963).
• Prose Keys to Modern Poetry (1962).

Fiction

• Edsel Dope (1971)

Secondary Sources

• Lee Bartlett, Karl Shapiro: A Descriptive Bibliography 1933-1977 (New York: Garland, 1979).
• Gail Gloston, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell: The Image of the Poet in the Late 1940s (Thesis: Reed College, 1957).
• Charles F. Madden, Talks With Authors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1968).
• Hans Ostrom, "Karl Shapiro 1913-2000" (poem), in The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis, 2006).
• Joseph Reino, Karl Shapiro (New York: Twayne, 1981).
• Stephen Stepanchev, American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey (1965).
• Melvin B. Tolson, Harlem Gallery (1965), with an introduction by Karl Shapiro.
• Sue Walker, ed., Seriously Meeting Karl Shapiro (Mobile: Negative Capability Press, 1993).
• William White, Karl Shapiro: A Bibliography, with a note by Karl Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State U. Press, 1960).