In ten years of reviewing verse. I have gone overboard, as they say, for only two first books—Shapiro's. "Person, Place and Thing" and Lowell's "Lord Weary's Castle"—as I intend to go for this one, (Terror and Decorum) and I can't think of a better way of beginning than by measuring it against the other two. The excitement of Shapiro's book was in its summing-up of the social revolt of a whole decade that had been (if we except Auden, in England) without a spokesman in poetry; with his personal blend of violence and elegant wit, Shapiro delivered the coup de grace to the Lost Generation (expatriate and metaphysical wings); yet in a sense he belonged to the exclusive circle which he exercised. But Lowell was a poet's poet from the start, and much too involved in the obscure theology or demonology of his New England soul to strike a common chord, but he achieved a profound poetic originality by clothing his contemporary nonconformism in the robes of a noble tradition.

Peter Viereck is harder to classify than Shapiro or Lowell. His style is much less "finished." He has written no single poem that is as impressive as the best of the other two. He writes poems and parts of poems bristling with undigested raw material or awkwardness of which the other poets are incapable. Yet his book as a whole is so rich in experimental vigor, so full of new poetic attitudes toward civilization and its discontents, so fresh and earthy in its re-animation of the American spirit, that it seems to offer endless possibilities of development—both for Viereck himself, and for other young poets who are certain to take the cue.

What makes him different seems so small a thing:
His knack of shaping joy from pain by rime.
He whittles joy so sharp it is a spear
And jabs it deep between the ribs of time.
Even his sickness blesses: singers wear
Neurosis like new roses when they sing.

This, Viereck's description of the fourth "stage of craftsmanship," could not be improved on as a description of his own particular qualities. No other poet but Cummings, the only contemporary Viereck remotely resembles or from whom he has borrowed anything conspicuous, is so haunted by the nightmare of writing a cliche—or undertakes such acrobaties, typographical, grammatical, and learnedly academic, to avoid one. An important difference, however, is that while Viereck's gyrations lead him to almost as many shocking successes—.

—he is never trying to bait anyone and hence is never deliberately elusive. Indeed one of the qualities that makes Terror and Decorum more of a break with the Eliotdominated past than any recent book is this very passion to communicate. It is on every page. It is in the sometimes fantastically pedantic notes. It is in the pages of "acknowledgments" (who but Viereck has ever listed his magazine articles along with his previous books!). It is in the ponderous conception of a prehistoric horse explaining in stanza after stanza of complicated ballad-meter how he lost his four toes; or the Idaho potato boasting this one comes off, brilliantly why it envies the stars. It is in the unabashed titles ("You All Are Static: I Alone Am Moving." "Hard Times Redeemed by Soft Discarded Values," "Why Can't I Live Forever?," "Don't Look Now But Mary is Everybody," "Graves Are Made to Waltz On." "Crass Times Redeemed by Dignity of Souls") above all it is in the was poems and the poems about the poet in America.

These two themes, naturally enough, are Viereck's major ones. He has been toughened, or sharpened if you like, by the two conflicts: trying to be a poet while being a soldier the was a GI in the African and Italian campaigns), trying to be a poet while making a living as a teacher of history at Harvard and Smith. The soldiering has contributed to his verse as a whole its racy colloquialism and its sense of identity with ordinary people. Academic training has given him a working knowledge of the styles of a half dozen literatures and a familiarity with cross-references in symbolism almost Joycean in scope. But it is the fight against these two conformisms—of the barracks and of the classroom—that makes the poetry.

Out of extreme complexity, simplicity. From sophistication beyond cleverness, innocence. In Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Hopkins, the later Yeats, perhaps in all of the greatest poetry, it is the "formula" toward which Viereck, more than any contemporary poet, seems to be moving. "Vale from Carthage," along with Shapiro's "Elegy for a Dead Soldier," the most impressive poem of World War II, begins ponderously with Viereck at the grave of a Roman thinking of an American friend shot dead at Rome who was sure he'd see Times Square again, but ends:

Roman, you'll see your Forum Square no more;
What's left but this to say of any war?

New York says to America (in a dialogue that could be, and in parts is, as corny as an immigration poster):

Your forests now are fences, and of late
You talk less of "frontiers" and more of real estate.

Viereck says to Crane (in a ballad that is refreshingly irreverent—and penetrating):

And in "Well Said, Old Mole," a poem that probably reflects Viereck's philosophy and his disarming directness as well as any, the complexities are cut away altogether:

Against the outside Infinite, man weighs
The inwardness within one finite face
And finds all Space less heavy than a sigh …
We are alone and small, and heaven is high;
Quintillion worlds have burst and left no trace;
A murderous star aims straight at where we lie.
And we, all vulnerable and all distress,
Have no brief shield but love and loveliness.
Quick—let me touch your body as we die.