Poetry doesn't write about what it writes about. Critics may now agree that this tends to be so, but why? Is it, as here argued, inherently so because of poetry's two or more rhythm-levels? Or is it, as many "explicating" critics imply, noninherently and only recently so because of the two or more diction-levels of the symbolist heritage? If the answer to the latter question is no, then the explicators have brought us to a blind alley by being oversubtle about (...) the ambiguities and ambivalences of diction and undersubtle about those of rhythm. The fact that good prose also has two rhythm-levels is not to the point. The tension between two irregular rhythms, as in prose, is simply not the same as that between one irregularity and one formal, traditionally shared regularity in poetry. The half-conscious uncovering of rhythm's hidden language helps explain an ancient truth: unlike a prose essay, a tragic poem or a tragic verse-play may leave the reader feeling exalted while an exalting love poem may leave him mournful. The explanation is not some miraculous "transcending" of tragedy and of the human condition but the uncovering of a palimpsest layer. What will be needed, from now on, are not generalizations but precise trochee-by-iamb-by-spondee analyses of why the relevant passages in King Lear, for example, achieve tragic joy by means of the joy-connoting rhythms beneath the somber words. While translating certain German and Russian poets of our century, I am also making a parallel analysis in parallel languages. My conclusion: the future translator should consult his dictionary less and his ear more . Poets, then, are not our Shelleyan "unacknowledged legislators" but our unacknowledged kinaesthesia. Peter Viereck, professor of European and Russian history at Mount Holyoke College, received the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Terror and Decorum ; this and his Conservatism Revisited and The Unadjusted Man have recently been reprinted by Greenwood Press. In a slightly revised version, "Strict Form in Poetry" appears as the appendix in his book of poems, Applewood, for which he has been awarded a fellowship by the Artists Foundation. See also: "On the Measure of Poetry" by Howard Nemerov in Vol. 6, No. 2. (shrink)

In this classic volume, written at the height of the Cold War, with a new preface of 2006, Peter Viereck, one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen of modern conservatism, examines the differing responses of American and European intellectuals to the twin threats of Nazism and Soviet communism. In so doing, he seeks to formulate a humanistic conservatism with which to counter the danger of totalitarian thought in the areas of politics, ethics, and art. The glory of the intellectuals was the (...) firm moral stance they took against Nazism at a time when appeasement was the preferred path of many politicians; their shame lay in their failure to recognize the brutality of Stalinism to the extent of becoming apologists for or accomplices of its tyranny. In Viereck's view, this failure is rooted in an abandonment of humane values that he sees as a legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism and certain strands of modernist thought and aesthetics. Among his targets are literary obscurantism as personified by Ezra Pound, the academicization of literary culture, the rigidity of adversarial avant-gardism, and the failure of many writers and cultural institutions to conserve the very heritage their political freedom and security depend on. Viereck represents their attitude in a series of satirical dialogues with Gaylord Babbitt, son of Sinclair Lewis' embodiment of conservative philistinism. Babbitt Junior is as unreflective as his father, but the objects of his credulity are the received ideas of liberal progressivism and avant-garde mandarinism. Ultimately, Viereck's critique stands as a timely rebuke to the extremism of both left and right. (shrink)

The main theme of this volume of selected essays on poetry and on history, written between 1938 through 2004, is suggested in Vierecks coined phrase 'strict wildness,'which suggests a balance between restraint and passion. The book explores questions of modernism and poetic craft with respect to American poetry. It discusses the controversy over Era Pounds politics and its relation to his poetics, and the nearly forgotten poet Vachel Lindsay. Viereck offers more general views on poetics, including the fruitful tensions between (...) form and content, and the impact of modern technology on poetic expression. This book also discusses history and politics, and contains essays on McCarthyism, the Cold War, political conformity of the Left and Right, and issues of historiography and culture that define Vierecks individual, often critical brand of conservatism. (shrink)

The great critic Peter Viereck, in a volume that both reproduces an earlier effort and presents an entirely new work on the intersection of history and literature, offers a biting critique of the American desire for normalcy that leads to a culture of the surrender of personality. In contrast to this voluntary thought control process is the unadjusted person. Cast in the mold of great individualists from Thomas More to Friedrich Nietzsche, such a person responds to fundamental values of conscience (...) rather than conformity built exclusively on ego gratification and icon worship. Viereck's book is a stinging critique of the liberal presumption of a monopoly in critical thought. He argues to the contrary, that most varieties of liberal expression offer little else than the common platitude dressed up as critique. In such a cultural environment, conservatism is the skeleton in the liberal closet. The virtue of conservatism is that in its very stress on liberty as dependent on tradition and law, it permits the human being an opportunity to test all transient things by the touchstone of all lasting ideas. Unadjusted Man cuts deep and in many directions: against left totalitarian regimes of Europe and right wannabes like McCarthyism in America. For Viereck, the art of conserving is not an embrace of utopias to come or empires that were, but retaining the sense of individuality over against the senselessness of the "massman." Civil liberties in this approach are a right to non-conspiratorial dissent informed by fundamental values. The new material is presented unabashedly--without an attempt to rewrite personal history, and with an admission that not every prediction made in the original edition has come to fruition. That said, the underlying themes of the original are not so much repeated as expanded upon. For those seeking a work in the classic mold of conservatism, rather than the strident reactionary views that have come to dominate much of the conservative dialogue, this will be a special book, a special entrance to the mind of a great figure in American culture wars of present as well as past. (shrink)