[In the following excerpt from a review, Nemerov describes The First Morning as an uneven mixture of "witty and ingenious poems " with a large quantity of mediocre work.]

The poet's responsibility to society…a matter much debated. In the phrase itself there is implicit some prospective metaphor of the poet as criminal, vainly trying to discharge his debt by means of his poems while all the time, really, it is something else that "society" wants. What? This has not been made clear, but seems to have confusedly to do with, on the one hand, messages of life and hope; with, on the other, moral earnestness and a severe, traditional look at current events. Archibald MacLeish takes in many places a severe view—with virtue, with this Republic, with poetry itself, things were formerly different, are now much degenerated, but the poet by his images may redeem the time, "Turn round into the actual air" and "Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!" Peter Viereck brings, so it is held by some, messages of life and hope; "perhaps…the promised man who is going to lead modern poetry out of the wasteland" (statement by Van Wyck Brooks, but what wasteland?), he wears his rue with a difference.

Both these poets, the one long established and latterly neglected, the other young and spectacularly successful almost from his first appearance a few years ago, are much given to debating, in poems and elsewhere, the theme of the poet's responsibility to society, and both have been quite downright on this subject; there is some temptation, which I hope I shall avoid, to treat them as the same poet Before and After. This temptation would lead conveniently away from the poetry and into a discussion on the implicit premise that the poetry didn't in fact matter and with the implicit conclusion that poet Before and poet After were of the same caliber, something I do not believe. What would matter, in such a discussion? Attitude (positive), ease and rapidity of "communication," political awareness, the quality of being contemporary (as today's newspaper is more contemporary than yesterday's newspaper). Above all, perhaps, the ability to take a revolutionary tone while moving steadily backward, the triumph of strategic withdrawal. Both these poets, perhaps in the largest part of their production, seem deliberately to invite a discourse in those terms, a discourse which, except for a feeble protest at one point, I do not feel drawn to give, preferring for the most part instead simply to record something of my impression of the poetry…

The poetry of Peter Viereck is often both pleasant and accomplished; light in tone, you might say, but never lacking in that suggestion of more serious stuff beneath the surface, a suggestion which no poet these days will do well to do without; there are also mythology and quotations from literature in foreign languages. Here is an example.

It is difficult, in our excitement, to know what we admire most, or first, about this poem—the skillful regularity of the meter? the way in which the syntactical and metrical units exactly coincide, one phrase to one line, to produce the lilting effect so characteristic of this poet's work? the alliterations and assonances (line 10)? the highly compressed allusions to literature and mythology (lines 1, 11, and 12)? the irony (title)? the nature imagery (lines 2, 4, 5, etc.)? the awareness of the contemporary scene (lines 3, 6, 9, 15)? or perhaps it is the morality (passim)? Anyhow, all these features work together to produce, in their intricate weavings and delicate tonal combinations, this poem. This poem is by no means the best in The First Morning, any more than it is the worst; probably the worst—allowing for the fact that I can't read German and have had to omit the consideration of three poems in that tongue—is one called "Love Song of Prufrock Junior," the first in a series called "1912-1952, Full Cycle."

The word goes round the English Departments that this is the equal of "The Lost Leader," and perhaps it is—though Professor Limpkin has acutely suggested that its allusive qualities (it is almost entirely built of cryptic references to Western Culture) may make it somewhat tiresome to the average undergraduate.

The best poems in this volume—including, on one opinion, "To be Sung," "Again, Again," "The Planted Skull," "Homecoming" and "Saga"—are quite good poems, perhaps a little light in weight. That they are great poems, that they constitute in any sense a revolution in the art (a return to this or revival of that), that they are particularly new or original or fresh, I submit that I doubt.

Now it is doubtless not nice to speak slightingly of a volume containing, say, half a dozen witty and ingenious poems which have given me pleasure, and I do not so speak merely because this volume contains also a relatively large amount of mediocre verse, fallen epigrams and jotted-down opinions, as well as a relatively staggering amount of simple blank space. But I feel (and feel I may as well express the feeling) a resistance to the pretension involved in the terms on which this verse is supposed to be taken—as "the present hope of poetry" (Robert Frost), "real magic" (Van Wyck Brooks), "conscientious skill … that makes much contemporary poetry look like the shabbiest free association" (David Daiches), "a break with the Eliot-dominated past" (Selden Rodman), "The modernist revolt has ended …" (Anthony Harrigan). These citations are from the dust-jacket of The First Morning, and though I have not quoted them in full the distinctive thing about them, as about so many favorable opinions of this poet, is visibly that it seems nearly impossible to praise Mr. Viereck except by way of taking a swipe at someone else; the ax-grinders seem to find him handy; uplifting Mr. Viereck seems to be the equal and opposite reaction generated by people standing on Mr. Eliot's head and jumping up and down. This suggests a certain expedient quality to the exaltation. When Mr. Harrigan, whom I quoted above, described Peter Viereck as "the principal standard-bearer of the tradition of humanistic democracy in this country," the battle-lines are drawn, one may or may not shudder for humanistic democracy, but in any event the poetry has been left to one side—as perhaps it should be, for I do not believe it will stand the strain of the program that is being erected for it. It is probably not good for the poet to become the standard-bearer of any party, the thing gets out of control—from being standard-bearer he becomes standard, and people wave him about wildly. I think the results begin to show in The First Morning, particularly in the number of pages given over to small versified remarks, parodies (even one of the poet himself, which does not appear to show any great self-knowledge) and pompously humorless jokes about poetry and criticism—the more or less affable informalities, the inflated marginalia, of the arbiter-elect. It is probably not good for the poet to become a myth, any myth but his own, surely; there is the danger of becoming at last, as Mr. Viereck in another connection points out, merely "a Maerchen dreamed by the deep, cool clams." Let the clams keep cool, they're not out of this wasteland yet.