[In the following essay, Jacobsen argues for the durability of Viereck's poetry, suggesting that in addition to his technical skills his work reveals a certain universality which she calls a "cosmic sense. "]

Though in general it is far from the case, one would think that humility would be an occupational hazard for the critic. The percentage of howlers produced by generally astute critics is history. But not even the widely held belief that Lalla Rookh was the apex of its century's literary offering, chastens the professional descendants of those prophets. Poetic chic flows on, carrying with it a number of fine poets, and all the flotsam of the arriviste and the second rate. Eventually, less precarious judgments are established.

As there are good poets whose especial vein happens to coincide with the current taste in poetry, so there are others whose especial gifts run, if not counter, yet not fully parallel to that taste. For these poets, the usual result is disproportion—a gulf between the calibre of their work and the dynamism of their reputation. Peter Viereck belongs to this second category.

He has accumulated the respectable honors—a Pulitzer Prize; two Library of Congress lecture appointments—but a dozen inferior poets figure more notably in the poetic press. His New and Selected Poems—ranging over thirty-five years—gives a complete enough representation of his work to make critical comment very worth while indeed.

Viereck's work has three qualities essential to that of any good poet. He has an individual, sustaining style. He has poetic convictions, flexible in approach but durable in essence. He has an affinity for themes of inherent scope and power. But in addition to these, he has something extremely rare in a mechanical and insulated age, something largely absent from contemporary poetry. To call it a cosmic sense sounds portentous. Yet this is what it is. Roethke had it, Tomlinson, and D. H. Lawrence. It is one poetic quality which is purely a gift, and there is absolutely nothing which can be done to simulate its possession. It is quite different from the gift for metaphysical conceits expressed in a sort of cosmic vocabulary; it is quite other than the ability to write good "nature poetry." It is instead a spontaneous reaction by which the poet feels himself constantly involved in a series of giant processes of which his humanity is only a part; not a knowledge that grass is growing, animal skin encasing its blood and flesh, trees toughening their bark, but a sense of the non-human, a sense of the multiplicity of matter, matter in the definition of physics: matter, that which is considered to constitute the substance of the physical universe, and, with energy, to form the basis of objective phenomena. This leads straight into a sense of the infinite depth of the small and the large, the minute and the enormous, and to glimpses into the dizzying abysses of time, those abysses which we habitually telescope into "the past." It is providential, since this rather massive gift is his, that Viereck has wit, virtuosity, and above all, poetic energy. These three last qualities do not always appear as friends; they are blood relatives to his dangers and defects, but they are indispensable to his over-all success.

One of the difficulties with which Viereck's poetry has to contend is that these dangers and defects spring to the eye. The poetry stands up. It does not quietly cave in when pushed by a second and third reading. But at first reading, the carnival atmosphere which is such an important ambiance for the work, can seem shrill, distracting, or over-done. Re-reading dispels a good bit of this impression; the stuff is there, under the mannerisms. It is true that, although it contributes strongly to his most successful poems, Viereck's technical virtuosity is allowed to spoil some of his work. Because he can manage a sequence of tour de force rhymes, he will do so at the risk of a sense of strain, and a diversion from the poem itself. He has, on the other hand, a lovely sense of the grotesque—both the sinister and the light-hearted—and happily addresses a potato (one of the "fat and earthy lurkers"),

O vast earth-apple, waiting to be fried,
Of all the starers the most many-eyed,
What furtive purpose hatched you long ago
In Indiana or in Idaho?

In Indiana and in Idaho
Snug underground the great potatoes grow,
Puffed up with secret paranoia unguessed
By all the duped and starch-fed Middle West.

Viereck's work, at its best, is almost perfectly implied in two of his lines:

Being absurd as well as beautiful
Magic—like art—is hoax redeemed by awe.

The hoax he consistently exploits; the awe is entirely real. His argument, again and again, is for the inherent and vitalizing duality. He acknowledges with respect the constant terrifying and decorous (terror and decorum are key words) counter-pull of death:life, hun-ger:satisfaction, intentionrundertow. He carries this into analysis, ethics, politics. Now and then he becomes pat, or instructive, so strongly does he feel his conclusion. But it is, most of the time, a fecundating process, an intuition of reciprocity, not optimistic, but mature and undespairing, and allowing for all surprises in the long process of

… doom made sweet in art
and Bloom out of bloom-dust gardened.

Viereck's work is strengthened by the conviction which he shares with a very different contemporary, Georges Ionesco: that the great themes are few and eternal, and that the intimidating anxiety in regard to falling into a cliché indicates a poverty in the poet's creative ability. He lampoons the nervous profferers of novelty as a substitute for creative freshness, who can only bewail the dailyness of the sun:

Trite flame, we try so hard to flout you
But even to shock you is cliché,
O catastroph-i-cal-ly dowdy
O tedium of gold each day!

He lampoons the nervous Januses who compete for cash by day and culture-certificates by night:

We've got to play with boors by day in order to stock the larder:
We put to flight that guilt by night, by hugging culture harder.

He lampoons the nervous gentility of

He is concerned to scrabble at the roots, to twitch off the label. His poems involving trees are marvelously treey; small wonder that his heroine of The Tree Witch, at bay between "We (The enlightened and emancipated technologizing moderns), and They (Our three guardians, the hygiene-spraying and jargon-spraying aunts … who … later turn out to be the vengeful Eumenides)," is a hamadryad, wrenched from her tree "stript, trapt and spitting." Birds, grass, loam, bears, moss, snails, snow, potatoes, fountains manifest themselves, rather than suffer a label.

Another characteristic which Viereck shares with his fellow-juggler, Ionesco, is a sense of the omnipresence of death. Death appears wearing ail sorts of masks: as the inevitable shift-point of the cycle,

Triumphant falling leaf, you are the strongest thing of all … ; as the lovers' chill observer (in a number of the beautiful lyrics which are Viereck's finest form),

The hibernating bear, but half alive,
Dreams of free honey in a stingless hive,
He thinks of life at every lifeless breath.
(The lovers think of death.) …,

as the blind flamingo in the brilliant and macabre "Why Can't I Live Forever?"

At night he wades through surf to seek a mate.
That's why he stinks of salt and oyster shells.
It is his blindness keeps him celibate;
This bungler thinks he kisses when he kills …,

or as the force in the sense of the past,

Sweet Eohippus, "dawn horse" in
That golden Attic tongue which now
Like you and Helen is extinct,
Like Cheshire-cat of fading grin,
Like Carthage and like Villon's snow,
With death and beauty gently linked.

If Viereck can be over-dextrous, didactic, he is never sentimental. And in view of the tenderness and delicacy of the loveliest of his lyrics, this says much for his poetic calibre. His love poems, sad or exuberant, have no taint of the mawkish. They do not depend on contrived shock for their sensual vitality, they don't substitute autobiography for emotional energy. And, being no sentimentalist, he understands that the undercurrent of nursery-rhymes is terror. His are splendid. He knows "the cupboard where the cakes and poisons are." His children who play hide and seek in the forest, grow up to be his lovers, who know

That through the gamut lovers' bodies press,
Through all that shattering terror's tenderness,
The whiplash of their tensest truth is this:
Their winged and stinking ecstasy flows bitter.

Viereck is an important poet, he is an honest and—at all risk of critical prediction—a durable one. He has an ear equalled by few poets now writing. One result is the effortless motion of his lyrics:

Birds are exploding into bloom and glowing,
And petals fan our sleep with little wings,
(Into your ear-drums what glass snake is flowing?
It is a Moorish fountain, and it sings.)

But in the end, the flavor of durability comes less from the components of his skill—the lyric tone, the virtuosity, the wit, the thematic strength—than from a sort of authority, a permanent sureness of decision. It is something which rises like an essence from the book's latest, and final, poem:

Wade without foresight or don't wade at all.
Plunge without seeing or you'll never find.
There's only insight. (Gulls read maps, their eyes
Look outward; berries, even winds are solid.
Roses are cold. Even warm roses are cold.)
There's only insight, paid for: not a flashlight,
But night probing night. Walk out alone.