[In the following review of Strike through the Mask!, Rosenthal claims that he endured Viereck's "saucy banalities" in this volume for the sake of six or seven rich, suggestive poems, including "Small Perfect Manhattan " and "My Gentlest Song.]

Those Terrifying Whimsies of Peter Viereck! Granted, as another, greater poet has told us, that a person of genius has to do something. Still, just look at the sort of thing he sees fit to print:

"None of that!" shouted the Ohio River. "No more roses and nightingales permitted to any poet who drinks our waters, yours or mine. Those creaking nightingales of the Rheumatic movement! Longfellow reads like a pretty short fellow nowadays. Better a live extravert than a dead lyre."

Yet we must bear with him. The man may be garrulous. He may write books about revisiting conservatism and finding it good. He may be an esthete right out of the nineties who really thinks he's doing something brandnew. He may moralize about Beauty and The Machine and at times sound like Vachel Lindsay. And, often, he may even rather fancy himself as a tree. (There is more passionate timber in his books than in Pound's, though the lumber is less learned.) Nevertheless he is, to quote him out of context and inaccurately, a "gen-u-ine poet."

For the sake, then, of a few untypical poems in this volume (Strike Through the Mask!) and in Terror and Decorum, his Pulitzer Prize winner of 1948, we shall have to forgive Viereck's endless slogans, the precious credos, the saucy banalities about poetry and this harsh world, etc., etc. These sorties are at any rate witty enough, and they do somehow serve to free him morally for the occasional luxury of doing the real thing. In the earlier book, they released him for such poems as the truly humane "Kilroy," the idealistic "Poet," the naïvely savage "From Ancient Fangs." Strike Through the Mask! is a less bitter collection. Outwardly bristling with even more intellectual defenses and diversionary tomfooleries, it holds within it a purer, more concentrated core of "genuine" verse.

Six or seven poems make up this core. Of these, only one, "Small Perfect Manhattan," can be called intellectually argumentative. What it "argues" for, as the title may suggest, is a new geographical association for the classic values, Europe and Africa having lost touch with the old idealism and the tradition of living song. Elsewhere Viereck has both admired and patronized Hart Crane; here, as in "Serenade," he comes very close to him in style and spirit:

Among these poems, too, we find "My Gentlest Song"—Viereck's one "tree-poem" which does not absolutely shriek its indignant message at us. The sense is surer, goes deeper here, than in many other more striking pieces. This love song of a pine tree to a rose—the utterly absurd "beautiful hunger" of the protecting pine for the "bright brief putrefying weed"—evokes the very essence of romantic pathos, all the more because it is never mechanically symbolic. A certain heaviness, a melancholy almost without objective meaning and yet intensely human, pervades this poem and the other "pure" poems in the book—particularly "Counter Serenade," "Obsessed by Her Beauty" and "Twilight of the Outward Life."

Viereck's whimsies and debating can be sold too short, of course. There is the joy of good satire in something like the Lindsayan chant, in his Americana section, about

Clambakes, clambakes on cranberry bogs:
Cans piled up to the moon.

He is generally amusing, or exciting, or in any case interesting, even when taste and originality desert him. And his range is wide, from sentimental trivia and comic ballads to the macabre irony of "To My Playmate" or the painful effort, in "Some Lines in Three Parts," to dramatize in images the "mangy miracle" of artistic creation. Yet even in this last poem the most moving lines are the ones which assert—with Yeats, one of Viereck's most apparent masters—the tragic paradox of the human condition so poignantly felt by the best poets of the late nineteenth century: