"Excursions of the visceral and irrational into the prose realm of politics and economics," writes Peter Viereck in this, (Terror and Decorum Poems 1940-1948) his first volume of collected poetry, "are either silly or sinister." That such excursions may not only be sinister, but catastrophic as well, is the message of Viereck's rather breezy analysis of the origins of Nazism, published in 1941 under the title Metapolítics: From the Romantics to Hitler.

In the present volume of poetry the theme of opposition between the "visceral and irrational" and the disciplines of sanity and control is more concisely, though no less breezily stated, and receives a more general application to human life and to poetry.

These basic oppositions, of course, are traceable to the old clash between romanticism and classicism. In Metapolitics Viereck, arguing for the theory that romanticism reached its "purest expression in those territories freest from Roman colonization" (i.e., Germany), remarks that romanticism is to be seen mainly "as a cultural and political reaction against the Roman-French-Mediterranean spirit of clarity, rationalism, form, and universal standards." Romanticism came out of the wild Saxon north as an energy of expansion and destruction, a principle of terror; classicism is the heritage of western civilization, the heritage of reason, law, control, order, and decorum. "Civilization's task," writes Viereck in Metapolitics, "is not a question of destroying but of harnessing the eternal romantic element." In other words, the spiritual and emotional energy of romanticism (love) must be guided by a principle of rational control (law).

In Terror and Decorum it is the poet, as a modern counterpart of the Promethean "culture-hero," who emerges as legislator, and who imposes civilization on savagery, just as he imposes form on matter. The "eternal romantic element" is identified by Viereck with the "tuneless mutiny of Matter;" hence the poet, in his struggle with the inherited, illegal expansiveness of romanticism, is really engaged in a larger struggle with the recalcitrance of matter. Poetic metaphor, in this encounter, is compared with the ritual of incantation; it tames "each thunderous force of nature by knowing its secret unnamable Name and saying it in the ritual of rhythm." Thus terror is tamed by knowledge and by poetry; thus "love and law, by pattern reconciled, must rhyme." The whole process, however, may "work" (culturally) without being "true" (literally), and the poet himself may be completely hidden behind his works, far from the gaze or knowledge of mankind. Nevertheless his pattern, "like the equally non-existent universals of Plato, may be daily moulding our meaningless existence into meaning."

For those who take poetry seriously, the spectacle of the poet subsisting on his own meaninglessness may not be altogether re-assuring; likewise, the theory that poetry creates its own meaning is not quite consistent with theories about value, reason, control, law, and decorum—all of which presuppose at least an external, if not an absolute, criterion—and all of which Peter Viereck holds to, as a professional humanist, against the "visceral and irrational."

Viereck has something of an insight into the tensions of poetry, into the struggles of the formative spirit, and into the spiritual area of romanticism; but he has mounted too shrilly and too athletically the stilts of "romanticismclassicism," and has taken this opposition, not so much as something from which one could learn, but as an article of faith and a source of poetry. It may well be that the hour of romanticism has struck and that a new order of form and control is rising; and it may be that these are signs of a recurring conflict of elements in the human soul. But such statements remain, somehow, on the side of literary history and psychology; and the poetry that would deal with them as basic remains limited to the fashions of "enlightened" criticism, feeding on theories and formulations rather than dealing with the substance of reality itself.

The poet as "legislator," moreover—except in the case of a long-established literary and cultural tradition—is an idea that is essentially romantic, for culture is a labor of reason more than a labor of art. If poetry, in the ritual of naming the unnamable, does not find it necessary to distinguish between "it-was" and "it is false," then the poet is a sorry legislator, and we must have recourse to philo-sophy, in which naming the unnamable is more than a ritual. It is doubtful, at this time, whether the humanistic faith in "universal standards" is the philosophy that we can most honestly have recourse to.

Many of the poems in Terror and Decorum do not seem related in any specific way to the theme of the book; and many of these are either boisterous, or abstruse, or macabre. The tone generally is one of sophisticated humor (suited, perhaps, to the pages of the various magazines in which Viereck's poetry has appeared) which occasionally takes a sardonic or a petulant turn, after the manner of an astringent Omar Khayyam. But in half-a-dozen poems (and especially in the "Author's Note on Marabouts and Planted Poets") Viereck states his theme well enough and seriously enough to be considered as a talent and as a man—perhaps a little too full—of theories.