Imagine a poem of epic length in which the main characters include Father, Son, You, Dionysus, Venus, Eve, Mary Magdalen and a Lungfish, mankind's amphibious ancestor. The poem's scope encompasses all of human time, from its first syllable to its apocalyptically re-engendering last. Though the work is provided with stage directions, its spatial range is not measurable. It takes place simultaneously in the cosmic mytho-sphere and in the mind of a composite version of Man. The author's high argument concerns the true path to self-overcoming, which he conceives as a process by which mankind learns to give up on ersatz versions of transcendence and exult in what we might call the poetry of earth. It is this renunciative embrace that the poet describes, memorably if abstractly, as the no that affirms more than yes.

The account I have offered so far might seem to fit a newly unearthed Gnostic text, or perhaps a radical alternative to Paradise Lost written by one of Milton's sectarian contemporaries. But Archer in the Marrow was published only a few months ago, and has already received high praise from James Dickey, Richard Wilbur and Joseph Brodsky, to name a few. Twenty years in the writing, Archer is the work of Peter Viereck, who has won past distinction as a lyric poet and also as a social historian and philosopher. Viereck is a man of considerable learning; his reading is large and his sense of responsibility to the past pervades the poem. But the work's diction, irreverent and demotic even at exalted moments, conveys the poet's urge to be responsive to the present. Viereck desires to be nothing if not timely. Why then does he write in the high mythopoeic style which seems, after the exertions of Shelley and Blake, largely to have died out of poetry in English? What currently dominant form is Viereck turning against and why?

The majority of contemporary poets are, in important ways, the descendants of John Keats, a judgment suggested by Walter Jackson Bate when in the great biography he encourages us to think of Keats as the first genuinely modern English poet. Keats's modernity lies, in part, in his having transferred the ambivalence that Wordsworth felt before Nature into the realms of art and culture in general. Keats, a born Cockney, was infatuated from early youth with the literary imagination, and particularly with the spirit of Romance as he found it exemplified first in Spenser and later in Milton and Shakespeare. Yet even as he loved Romance, Keats resisted it. He was self-consciously a poet of the Enlightenment, eager to contribute to what he called the Grand March of Intellect. Poetry needed, if it was to survive, to evolve beyond superstition and wish-fulfillment and become a source of humane knowledge. Thus some of Keats's greatest poems, such as "Ode to Psyche," The Fall of Hyperion, and "To Autumn," dramatize the process by which the poet questions his reliance on the sublime mythic forms and begins to evolve toward something else.

What else was the question. Keats's inability to answer it effectively led him, one can speculate, to abandon the Hyperion poems, and to hover in an infinitely extended farewell to the goddess Autumn in his last major performance. Keats's quandry has, at least in my view, developed over time into the central question posed by contemporary poets. What poetic affirmations are possible in the context of a culture devoted to becoming fully secular, completely demystified? Are there moments of sympathetic illumination that can sustain themselves without appeal to any of the antiquated principles of transcendence? If the great modernist writers taught us, in their most rigorous works, how to live without a conventional version of God, their inheritors have affirmed what they could without referring to the sovereign ego, to the cultural tradition, or even to the anti-truths of deconstructive thought for confirmation. The poetry of John Ashbery, for instance, gives its wistful assent to nothing so much as the desire to skate on surfaces, to find pleasure in appearance, in disconnected phenomena and unguided talk, without origin or destination.

Viereck possesses none of Ashbery's calculated ease; his persona is emphatically that of a maker, not a site where poems coalesce. But Viereck's devotion to craft, manifest in sophisticated rhyming and technical play, doesn't quite place him in the Augustan line either, the line that reaches its zenith in Pope and progresses through Byron and Auden to present day writers like James Merrill and, in a minor key, James Fenton and Vikram Seth. There is a side of Viereck that, in the Augustan mode, is urban and urbane, skeptical, conservative, witty and worldly-wise. But Viereck's larger aspirations place him in the visionary or apocalyptic tradition that runs through the English Bible, Spenser and Milton before it reaches Shelley and Blake and, in a highly displaced form, Whitman.

Post-Enlightenment practitioners of the visionary mode like Viereck tend to believe that poetic truth lies embedded in the sublime forms of Romance, myth and religion. Where the Keatsian naturalist attempts to evolve away from the sublime, and the Augustan poet to parody sublimity when he considers it at all, the modern visionary reimagines the received myths against the normative grain. By creating the figure called Los, for example, Blake believed that he was offering a truer conception of Adam than the one currently in circulation. The assumption guiding this kind of activity is that usage and the needs of a fallen society to see itself justified in literature have led to a programmatic distortion of major imaginative works such as the Bible. It is the wager of poets like Viereck that we all possess a certain spiritual promise which, though now in bondage to custom and convention, can be unlocked by an inspired recreation of traditional figures and myths. The result of such a recreation will inevitably be a religious text, a text that has as its ultimate aim the conversion of its reader to another way of life. The visionary poet always aspires to play the role of Socratic midwife. What sort of conversion does Viereck have in mind?

Viereck's designs on the reader come through most perceptibly in the design of the poem. Archer, which is subtitled The Applewood Cycles, itself composes one large cycle. It begins, as almost all visionary works do, with a myth about the fall of man. This fall takes place in the nether zone of Part Zero (Outside Time), which is to suggest that the fall is always occurring, and that it never has occurred at any determinate point in time. From there the poem proceeds through a series of encounters in which You—Viereck's version of Everyman—learns his own past and present failings and his possible future strengths. Fully instructed, You acts his crucial part in the climax of the poem, Part Zero Replayed, in which the losses of the opening section are redeemed. Archer, then, is a rite de passage: the initiate is You.

Every re-birth ritual requires a guide to see the initiate through his trials, and Viereck's chosen guide carries the name of the most illustrious mediator of the Western tradition, the Son. But Viereck, in visionary fashion, has reimagined the Son, making him a figure frequently at odds with the standing orthodox version of the savior of mankind. The Son's failing, self-acknowledged early-on in the poem, was to have embraced asceticism and the promise of heavenly reward, and given up on the beauties, pleasures and sorrows of earthly life. So he castigates himself for having

Transcended laps of loam for sky-high cleanness.
… Triumph? I failed—I fell (crest drained the root)
Uphill.

The Son's icy renunciation is also represented as a split between the Son and his pagan double, Dionysus, the vital earth-god. You will only be healed when he can unify the torn principles of Christian gentleness and Dionysian passion and see, as a reflection of his own restored spirit, the image of "goatfoot Jesus on the village green."

Inhibiting this fulfillment is the figure Viereck calls Father, "the old universal thunder God, the brutality of reality, masked by the jauntiness of a stand-up-comic Mephisto." It's he—or the internal forces he represents—who deludes man into transcendent hopes and induces him to banish Pan and replace his kingdom with the earthly reign of guilt and anxiety. Where Pan was, Pain presides. Father is a descendant of the spectre of limitation that Blake called Nobodaddy, lord of jealous hate and sterility, Nobody's Daddy. He's also related to Hardy's aphasie God, whose creations pose questions and suffer torments his weak mind can't encompass. But Viereck's spry old huckster has a character very much his own, as a few of his lines will illustrate:

Fellows, it's not been easy being God;
The hohum festered worse than thorn or rod.

My cross?—ennui's insomnia.
And yours?—mors vincit omnia.

Virtue?—dowdy.
Vice?—frowzy.

You've stuffed with 'God' the sky that left you friendless,
You taxidermists of the empty Endless.

Even when he's suffering from the tyrant's malady—tedium vitae—Father's learned rasping wit and slingshot delivery make him more invigorating company than by all rights he ought to be. In any event, he supplies a fine counterpoint to the Son, who occasionally grows too pious about his impiety.

The Son is at his most effective as a voice and a character when he relinquishes his part as You's mediator and reflects on his own failings, which are of course inseparable from the failings of orthodox Christianity, and on his all too human sufferings and losses. This reflection culminates early in the poem in what is to me the most bold and moving conceptual leap that Viereck makes, his identification of Christ's crucifixion with the Holocaust. The conjunction itself is not new: Viereck makes reference to Pope John XXIII's prayer, "Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh," and the sentiment could obviously be found elsewhere. What is new is the complex development that Viereck gives to the idea and the startling language in which the Son first expresses it:

Here on Skull Hill, no chubby grass;
The dogs were fetid, it's the air went mad.
Rome's Kraut Centurions sweated out their north.
They gave me—I thought it was water—gall,
Or was it (time swirling me back and forth)
Gas? Mad air,
Were you fooling around with my shower stall?
And back here on the hill was the heat already a breath
From my second death, from my far
Chimney's Baal-bellied belch?
No, it was still my first Passion play; Bethlehem's star
Had not yellowed into a badge.

The diction is harsh, somewhat in the mode of Donne and Webster, impacted and raggedly eloquent. "Were you fooling around with my shower stall?" seems to me close to bad taste, which Viereck, like Donne and Webster, will risk in the interest of shocking the reader into perceptions he would like to resist. The line remains questionable. But the closing metaphor, in which the Bethlehem star and the yellow star, which Jews under Nazi subjection were compelled to wear, merge, represents a feat of ethical imagination.

The suggestion is present in the trope, and Viereck does not retreat from it, that the ascendancy of the star of orthodox Christianity involved, as a consequence, the twentieth century persecution of the Jews. The reasoning behind this view is not simple, but it is cogent. Viereck's Christ collaborated in his own martyrdom out of a sincere, if misguided, desire to overcome all earthly attachments. ("Was I wrongly 'right' when I dyed love white / To bleach my own frenzies?" he asks himself in retrospect.) His death's legacy to Christians, thus, entailed the obligation to perfect and purify the soul by making it the repository of only immortal thoughts. The communal equivalent to this private drive for purification is scapegoating, which purges the society by driving out the stranger, the other, the Jew:

Eons of stinkless Immaculate love
Parked at a cattle car.
One yellow for badge or for manager.
A star found its way to a star.

The wages of cold Christian virtue is death, a judgment finally too reductive to stand as the sole "deep" explanation for the Holocaust. Yet the metaphor—star for star—carries the force of authentic divination, which one does not dismiss easily.

The reader who, because he lacks overt Christian allegiances would tend to look on Viereck's charge with aesthetic detachment, may find himself implicated by way of the poem's second key conceptual move. This one is less striking than the first, having been anticipated for some time by anti-metaphysicians like Heidegger and his descendants Derrida and Foucault. To Viereck, the modern age has not surpassed Christianity, but transferred its impulses intact to another sphere. The worship of the God Mek—whose name Viereck derives from the Hittite word for power—is the currently operative transcendental faith. Technology offers its worshippers what Christianity did, the prospect of passing beyond the human condition and living with god-like powers.

The result is a split between the archaic natural self and the post-modern cybernetic mind:

"Brave new machine, 'tis I, thy Luddite lover,
Still splitting metal mind from gothic heart,
Medievally mod. Solve contradictory me.
Or crash me; I can't get off."

The speaker, a male lab boss, is in the quandry that Freud attributed to over-civilized man in Civilization and Its Discontents. The subject's urge to refine himself into immortal, stainless perfection is running into conflict with the demands of his instinctual self, which has become darker and more dangerous—Viereck says "gothic"—in confinement. The results are too easily predictable. Predictable too, I'm afraid, because far too programmatic, are the lab boss's lines. But at other times, Viereck's rough humor throws life into the idea. Here's You as Mek's macho servant:

"If we've no better fate than hooks to face,
Let's go down shooting, let jets rape space.
Man's your amok amoeba, mugger of the universe,
Ramming all Black Holes with our jet's white spurts."

The vision of man as cosmic rapist flourishing his jetphallus evokes the misogyny that Viereck, rightly I think, sees an inseparable from faith in Mek.

Mek is one in an array of God-terms (or "transcendental signifieds," if you like) that Archer works to dispose of through dialectic. The body of the poem, from Part Zero to the climactic Replay at the end, consists largely of a series of dialogues between You and Father and You and Son, with occasional monologues by figures like Venus, Dionysus and the Lungfish. The exchanges are supposed to lead You away from the old illusions and reductions, and into an affirmation of nature, the earth, mortality and the "minute particulars" of life. By the end of the treatment—for there is something of the therapeutic as well as the religious about this text—the reader has presumably learned to give up on progress, pure knowledge, absolute power, domination and greed, and to affirm the merged form of Dionysus/Christ. Their conjunction represents, to Viereck's mind, the joining of pity with passion, appetite with gentleness, and the self-vaunting power of Romantic self-creation with the desire to live harmoniously among others, and, if need be, for others. And with the imaginative achievement of this ideal, the epic reaches its end.

So far my account of Archer has focused on its conceptual designs, an approach that is both just and unjust. Unjust because, at least to me, the chief glory of the poem lies in its lyrical achievement. Viereck's range is stunning. He is, first of all, a superb satirist. His composite portrait of the citizen of ancient Rome/contemporary L.A. (a portrait, I suspect, of the work's more resistant readers) is at once savage and coldly incisive. Throughout the poem, Viereck's standard perspective is masculine, learned and experienced, but he's also capable of disarmingly tender writing, as when he speaks of a "turquoise so blue that the stone is the hue / And 'blue' the metaphor." The dramatic monologues spoken by Aphrodite and Dionysus, and some of those by You and the Son, constitute the finest moments in Archer. They're passionate, infused with prodigious local invention, and tempered with Viereck's style of irony, a strong bass line that perpetually evokes the press of transience. Of particular distinction is the speech in which, with an exuberance comparable to Whitman's, Dionysus celebrates his metamorphoses:

Don't you smirk too; I know I'm all awry.
I'm fluff, I stick to every whim like lint.
I'm dandelion fuzz: my gold spikes dry
And silver off with every aimless wind.

I wear what glistens (next round, I'll leap as trout).
My motes traipse far—I gawk from every spark.
I rocket from smokestacks, intersect with soot,
And stun noon's sauna with my sunnier dark.

The speech is a verbal fugue, brilliantly extemporizing on the theme of transformation, without an uninspired moment, for over two hundred lines. And as if speaking through the mouth of the wine god or the savior didn't provide enough challenge, Viereck also attempts, and largely brings off, monologues by a gallows tree, a gangplank and a paving stone. Putting a soliloquy by a potato into a life's crowning work probably betrays an impulse to self-destruction, but given the odds against, the potato acquits himself honorably.

Archer is always written full-out and teems with strongly conceived lines. "There are no lazy intervals," as the Richardsons, Milton's editors, said of his epic. Unlike many contemporary poets who feel that to have written a few stanzas that are beyond reproach is to have written a poem, Viereck takes verbal chances constantly. He'd rather risk over-stepping than let a chance go by. But the semantic density of the poem arises, ultimately, from the fact that the true matrix of Viereck's work is the riddle. He loves submitting the reader to tricky compressed passages. Depth-charges are scattered everywhere, and you have to stand guessing in front of some of the poem's best lines—and a few that turn out shallow. The overall sensibility, almost no matter which figure is speaking, is mock-oracular, as though Nietzsche's Zarathustra were slightly drunk and throwing his voice through Delphic shadows. And the reader is complelled to construe it all as he can. The first time through, he's likely to be baffled and exhilarated by the carnival of ideas—historical, artistic, philosophical, political and theological—refracted through the medium of Viereck's singular style. Archer presents itself, first, as an inspired celebration of the polymathic perverse.

But the poem is, in its strongest intentions, religious: its aim is to convert the reader, to impress its terms upon him as ultimates. A second reading reveals a pressure of ideas upon the work so strong that a conceptual description (such as the one I began with) becomes inevitable and just, despite the poem's lyric heights. For those heights occur only when Viereck manages to cut himself loose for a time from his polemical task. One is reminded here of Auden, who said that someone who wanted to hang around words to see what they might be up to had a better chance of becoming a poet than did a man with truth to impart. Viereck is undoubtedly a poet, but his attachment to a gospel constrains his gifts. Though his words are a force of irregulars, most of the time they are waging carefully conceived ideological war. There's too much Prospero and not enough Ariel, to borrow again from Auden—or a bad mix of Holofernes with Orpheus, if one's resistance to didactic work is absolute. The more you read Archer, the more you feel its imperial ambitions.

In his most didactic moments, which occur in the dialogic sections of the poem, the resources of poetry frequently act for Viereck in the way that the "dream work" acts in the Freudian account of dream production. The grotesque diction and unfamiliar rhymes serve (for a time) to disguise the heuristic intent in the same way that "condensation" and "displacement" hide the dream-wish from the censorious ego. Viereck's technique amounts to distortion, rather than imaginative transformation, of ideas because the message remains firmly under his conscious control. All of Viereck's riddles have right answers. He doesn't allow for enough play in the poem; he won't let his words float to accrete unexpected meanings. We get coded Truth, and little chance to make up our own minds.

Viereck is not unaware of the problem. In a brilliantly written appendix, he describes his rhyming technique—which is related to Emily Dickinson's "slant" rhyming—as a way of ironizing the text and introducing a full play of meaning. But the necessity for including the appendix speaks against its thesis. The poem comes with three sections of prefatory explanation, the appendix, notes (apparently enforced on the poet by his publisher) and a glossary. Archer is already a Norton Critical Edition. And doesn't this drive for ultimate authority over his own production bring the poet uncomfortably close to those purveyors of absolute knowledge that the poem so energetically assaults?

But there is, I think, a more significant contradiction at the work's core. I said at the beginning of the review that Viereck's objective is to affirm something we might call the poetry of earth. The phrase is Keats's, and the ethos to which Archer finally commits itself would be very hard to distinguish from Keatsian naturalistic humanism. In other words, Viereck endorses the values most other contemporary poets are attached to. And yet he does so by way of a visionary epic, a poetic mode which qualifies, perhaps, as an exercise in the kind of grand selfvaunting thought that the poem seems to be enjoining us to give up on. To modify Karl Kraus's remark on psychoanalysis somewhat. Archer may be an instance of the malady for which it purports to be the cure.

Even if we suspend this kind of a criticism as being merely ingenious (which I don't think it is), there is still the question of the freshness of Archer's findings. Keats never did arrive at a fully developed vision of his naturalism, it's true. But Wallace Stevens, for whom "the poetry of earth" was a congenial phrase, may have reached the point where Archer ends as early as Harmonium, his first volume. There, in the poem "Sunday Morning," he wrote of the struggle to renounce other-wordly dreams:

Viereck may not have much to add to Stevens's early vision of a world content without transcendental faith, though Viereck's sense of what can happen in politics and private life when we fail to embrace a poetry of earth is startling and fresh. And so too are his monologues which, when they unyoke themselves from ideological weight, represent some of the best lyric poetry of recent years.

Is Archer, then, a great poem? Is it, as the recent Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky has said, "the major event in American poetry of today, on a par with Williams's Paterson and Pound's Cantos"? Even if the criticisms I've made are just, they do not necessarily make this question an empty one. Paradise Lost is, by consensus, the most perfect long poem in the language, but consensus probably agrees with Dr. Johnson too in not wishing it longer. The number of literary offenses one could compile against Paterson and The Cantos is perhaps endless, and yet there is no prospect of their being displaced from the modern canon. They have both answered to the pragmatic standard for poetic survival: they have affected good young poets and generated a body of critical response.

Viereck, I would predict, will not do so. His text could keep the scholars busy for more than a few decades; it's crammed with allusions, references, echoes, motifs and significant structures. But I doubt young poets will be inspired by it: didactic poetry is their "abhorrence," as it was Shelley and Keats's, and too many of Archer's driving concepts are by now commonplace. Yet Viereck occasionally shows evidence of possessing a genuinely prophetic temper; which suggests not that he can divine the precise events of the future, but that perhaps he can intuit the shape of its imaginative needs. If poets and readers in years to come find themselves in the situation that Johnson attributed to us all—of needing more to be reminded of humane knowledge that we have had than to be informed of things previously unknown—then perhaps Archer in the Marrow will be there to do it.