Peter Viereck is primarily a poet of ideas. The ideas that have been flying around in his head for the past eight years find resolution in sporadic order. There's the rub: much tumult, much prestidigitation, variety of trials and effort, considerable learning, and the result is an uneven book of poems (Terror and Decorum) containing a good number of excellently realized pieces.

He challenges the reader with a new complex of contemporary feelings, presented in a vigorous play of growing and shifting attitudes. He synthesizes his experience in his own way, leaning both on traditional usages and on experimentation. He does not go back to social protest. He does not continue the religious revival. He creates predominantly a secular breadth conscious of secular depth coming down from ancient times, from various cultures.

Peter Viereck is not grinding an axe. Voracious for experience, he accepts it by exfoliation of notions, diversely calculated. He looks from his China to his Peru with sprightliness of thought, artistic detachment allowing him to express his personality without fear either of enthusiasm or gaucherie.

As a new poet he is neither cynical nor melancholy. He is this—worldly, not other-worldly in the sense of one who attempts to penetrate hidden reaches of the soul. He is concerned with the problem of the formalizing of knowledge. We see the play of his mind shining from and glancing from invented shields of tempered form.

The "Author's Note on Marabouts and Planted Poets" specifies some of his preoccupations and illuminates his intentions. He states that "the poet imposes form upon nature, humanism upon the inhuman." Note the breadth of skills showing in poems like "Ballad of the Joliie Gleeman" and "Prooimion"; "Hard Times Redeemed / By Soft Discarded Values" and "Crass Times Redeemed / By Dignity of Souls"; or "Poet," "Well Said, Old Mole" and "Vale From Carthage."

The war as he knew it is reworked without his becoming mired in it, disinterestedly. He sees a wry decorum in a "Child of the Sixtieth Century" and evokes a submerged terror in "Dolce Ossessione." Light verse is permitted, as in "To a Sinister Potato" and "What a Pretty Net."

The following is partial quotation from "Vale From Carthage"