Peter Viereck

Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American writer, poet, and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for Terror and Decorum, a collection of poetry. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.

Early life and education Viereck was born in New York City, on August 5, 1916, son of George Sylvester Viereck. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 1937. He then specialized in European history, receiving his M.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942, both from Harvard.

Career Viereck was prolific in his writing from 1938, publishing collections of poems, some first published in Poetry Magazine. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum. ), partly in reaction against the ideologies of his father, George Sylvester Viereck, a Nazi sympathizer.

His beliefs are difficult to categorize as they raise questions about what "conservative" really means:

According to Tom Reiss, Viereck was right, as he wrote in Conservatism Revisited (1949), that he "had 'opened people's minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.' But, he said, 'once their minds were opened, Buckley came in'."

In 1962, he elaborated upon the differences he saw between real conservatives and those he called pseudo-conservatives. He wrote of

In January 2006, Viereck offered this analysis:

I think McCarthy was a menace ... because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right ... and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we are all suffering from it. Guggenheim Fellowships in poetry and history

Works In Poetry Magazine "Graves Are Made to Waltz On," Volume 56, July 1940, Page 185 "Sonnet for Servants of the Word," Volume 68, September 1946, Page 302 "Vale," from Carthage, Volume 70, July 1947, Page 182 "Five Theological Cradle-Songs," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115 "Better Come Quietly," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115 "Why Can't I Live Forever?," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115 "Blindman's Buff," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115 "Game Called on Account of Darkness," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115 "Hide and Seek," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115 "A Sort of Redemption," Volume 72, August 1948, Page 238 "Elegy to All Sainthood Everywhere," Volume 72, August 1948, Page 238 "Love Song of Judas Smith," Volume 74, August 1949, Page 256 "Again, Again!," Volume 80, April 1952, Page 6 "Girl-Child Pastoral," Volume 81, October 1952, Page 80 "Nostalgia," Volume 82, April 1953, Page 18 "Benediction," Volume 85, February 1955, Page 255 "A Walk on Moss," Volume 87, October 1955, Page 1 "We Ran All the Way Home," Volume 96, August 1960, Page 265

Poetry collections 1948: Terror and Decorum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 1949: The Poet in the Machine Age 1950: Strike Through the Mask! New Lyrical Poems 1952: The First Morning, New Poems 1953: Dream and Responsibility: Four Test Cases of the Tension Between Poetry and Society 1954: The Last Decade in Poetry: New Dilemmas and New Solutions 1956: The Persimmon Tree: new pastoral and lyrical poems 1961: The Tree Witch: A Poem and Play (First of All a Poem) 1967: New and Selected Poems: 1932-1967 1987: Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles of 1967-1987 1995: Tide and continuities: Last and First Poems, 1995-1938 2005: Door: Poems 2005: Strict Wildness: Discoveries In Poetry And History

Intellectual history 1941. Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler. A. A. Knopf. Revised and enlarged edition published by Capricorn Books in 1965 as Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind. Expanded edition published by Transaction Publishers in 2004 as Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. 1949. Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, Transaction Publishers [Rep. by The Free Press, 1962; expanded and revised edition, by Transaction Publishers, 2005, with a major new study of Peter Viereck and conservatism by Claes G. Ryn]. 1953. Dream and Responsibility: Four Test Cases of the Tension between Poetry and Society, University Press of Washington. 1953. Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, Beacon Press [Rep. by Capricorn Books, 1965; Greenwood Press, 1978; Transaction Publishers, 2006]. 1956. Conservatism: from John Adams to Churchill, Van Nostrand. Conservative Thinkers: From John Adams to Winston Churchill, Transaction Publishers, 2005. 1956. The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans, Beacon Press [Rep. by. Greenwood Press, 1973]. Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment: Where History and Literature Intersect, Transaction Publishers, 2004. 1957. Inner Liberty: The Stubborn Grit in the Machine, Pendle Hill. 2011. Strict Wildness: Discoveries in Poetry and History, Transaction Publishers.

Select articles "But—I'm a Conservative!", The Atlantic Monthly, April 1940. "On Conservatism: Two Notes," American Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3, Autumn, 1949. "Soviet-German Collaboration," The Forum, August 1949. "The Decline & Immortality of Europe," The Saturday Review, March 3, 1951. "Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals," The Reporter, May 27, 1952. "Sunrise in the West," The Saturday Review, June 12, 1954. "The New American Radicals," The Reporter, December 1954 Rep. in The American Conservative. "The Unadjusted Man," The Saturday Review, November 1, 1958. "The Crack-Up of American Optimism," Modern Age, Summer 1960. "The Split Personality of Soviet Literature," The Reporter, March 15, 1962. "Metapolitics Revisited," Humanitas, Volume XVI, No. 2, 2003.