[In the following review of The Persimmon Tree, Carruth considers the poetry in this volume an improvement over Viereck's earlier works but confesses that he finds Viereck's poems "painfully hard to read."]

Peter Viereck's new poems are very similar in tone and manner to the earlier poems which won him such great popularity, yet there is, I think, a difference. His book, The Persimmon Tree, is divided into a number of sections, and particularly in the one marked "Pastoral" the new poems offer a somewhat gentler flow, an easier tone of voice. To my mind this is an improvement, and I like some of these new poems very much. Viereck manages to bring to the meditative lyric, our supremely popular kind of poem, an individuality of voice and a rather nervous movement which make his poems genuinely distinct from the rest and superior to most of them. He is, of course, an accomplished writer, a clever writer, and his skill has a good deal to do with the success of his successful poems. I mean that his accomplishment lies partly in his ability to please us with purely verbal constructions, apart from their context of thought or feeling. But his virtuosity sometimes interferes with his poetry too. Distinctions of rhyme, I know, are ultimately a matter of taste, but to my ear the rhyme of "where sol lives" with "olives" in a poem which is otherwise quite serious and even graceful seems a grievous obtrusion. In other poems, the virtuosity is better placed. "Decorum and Terror," for instance, a tour de force in which Viereck uses, I am sure, every imaginable rhyme on his own surname, is a frank offering of doggerel, quite suitable to its subject (a conversation between Goethe and Hart Crane), and is the kind of cogent farce for which we can always be grateful in this comparatively dull time. In short, Viereck's new poems are strong and varied and on the whole good examples of what the poet can do at this stage of literary development.

That, at least, is what must be said before I can proceed to some of the other thoughts which occurred to me while I was reading these poems: it is the view which, although not necessarily orthodox in itself, nevertheless projects its meaning against our consciousness of orthodoxy. But I think that if one makes the effort to escape for the moment from our particular encampment and look back, as it were, from the surrounding hills, one's view becomes both more detached and more doubtful. In doing so, of course, one destroys the individuality of Viereck's poems, which become instead merely motions representative of our whole activity, and it is important to bear this in mind. But what does one see first of all? It is, I think, the congestion of our work. The truth is that Viereck's poems are painfully hard to read.

One does not understand immediately why this should be so. In mood and theme, Viereck's poems are not at all unfamiliar to us. His technique is the accustomed alogical and associative way of proceeding in which we have been well schooled. Moreover, in these poems the intellectual and emotional processes occur at a public though naturally high level of culture; we are not left behind, as we have been sometimes, in a poet's essentially private excursions. Yet something is wrong. We can attend easily, almost habitually, to these poems, we can admire them, but at the end, as often as not, we are left with a sense of weariness and dissatisfaction, as after an unnecessarily difficult labor. Here is the shortest poem in Viereck's book; it happens to be also the poem from which the book takes its title.

Not as we wish, accoutred regal,
Our soarers land but pent in cloud.
So must we take each molted eagle
Just as he comes or do without.
No radiance radiates. Its birth is
Dark-stained with lusts and blasphemies.
We sing them shiny if we please.
Or snuff them. Either way, unclean.
We dodge with outrage or derision
Truths that assault us squashily:
Each clowning, sweetish, harsh-cored vision
That shoots from the persimmon tree.
Brief bloom, we always wrong you; earth is
A drabber patch than need have been.

Here the poem, which I take to be a comment on the failure of the artistic imagination, progresses so heavily through its difficult changes that at the end it is pretty well wrung out, and so are we. From moulting eagle to metallic song to squashy fruit to flowering vision, with perhaps a dozen minor shifts, we go at a labored pace. I am not complaining about a mixed metaphor; that, after all, is the poet's business. I am complaining about a false density of metaphoric writing which has become virtually automatic and empty of any real urgency.

The symbolist movement in English poetry is a notably difficult thing to locate, probably because it envelops us and much of our tradition so mistily. But say experimentally that it was predicted by Blake, founded by Wordsworth, muddled by the Pre-Raphaelites, restored by the French, perfected by the generation of Eliot and Stevens, and upraised to a fragile and collapsing peak by Dylan Thomas. Where does this leave us now? And what has been the pull of this long experience in symbolism upon the permanent stuff of poetry, upon metaphor? Metaphor has, I think, warped closer and closer to symbol, as toward an unattainable perfection. Symbolism, a technique of thought and feeling, has naturally intervened with metaphor, a technique of writing. Metaphor has striven, in a manner of speaking, toward the state of being compact, autonomous, luminous, toward the state of being a symbol. But perhaps this movement has endured beyond its point of real meaning and tension, perhaps now the ultimate moment is behind us, perhaps this accounts for the loss of creative urgency. Metaphor is beginning to disintegrate, and its fragments fall and clatter in our poems. That is to say, the unity of feeling and technique is gone; we are perpetuating the technique because it is our endowment, already our burden, and because we do not know how to begin again. We become anxious, and in the poem we twist the line of metaphor so that it becomes forced, conspicuous, and exorbitant. This is what I mean by a poem that is hard to read.