SOURCE: "The Tall Ideas Dancing: Peter Viereck, or the Poet as Citizen," The Western Humanities Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, Summer, 1955, pp. 249-60.

In the following essay, Hayward examines Viereck's insistence on making ethical judgments about poetry and considers his commitment to writing poetry that maintains a vital, active relationship to both politics and culture.

Peter Viereck is becoming an increasingly powerful voice for a thoroughgoing re-appraisal of the trends that dominated poetry, literary criticism, and political thought between the two world wars. Like the symposium Critics and Criticism, edited by R. S. Crane,¹ Viereck's three books of poems, his numerous magazine articles, and his recent volume of satiric prose present a basic challenge to the New Poetry and to the New Criticism which it stimulated. The challenge is long overdue. A too-easy victory over the shallow philistinism and pedantic academicism of the 'nineties and the years before World War...