SOURCE: "Tall Ideas Dancing," Poetry, Vol. 73, No. 5, February, 1949, pp. 289-91.

In the following review of Terror and Decorum, Goodman faults Viereck for stopping short of self-exploration and for finding satisfaction in a "disheartening" superficiality.

The most moving of these poems—to my sensibility almost the only moving one—"A Walk on Snow," has the following theme: the possibility of a meaning appears in experience, "a rite, an atavism…Myth"; the poet "drunk with self-belief" tries to control it and wrest a factual answer; then

 At once the gate slammed shut, the circle snapped,
The sky was usual and broad and silent. 

So Wordsworth, in the Ode, came to the line, "And fade into the light of common day." But the difference between this poet and Wordsworth is crucial: Viereck apparently does not believe in the meaning, does not remember it, thus he derogates it, calls the sense of...