Time has worn away the reputations of many poets who, heralded while alive, exist for posterity only in footnotes. George Sylvester Viereck has suffered a worse fate: not only have literary histories paid him scant attention, but at the height of his renown (and notoriety) as a poet he became persona non grata because of his continued vehement defense of Germany after the United States entered World War I. Despite his genuine pro-Americanism, he was expelled from the Poetry Society of America in 1918, dropped from Who's Who in America , and saw his poems omitted from anthologies.

Because his political activities distracted potential readers from Viereck's poetry and prevented Viereck himself from writing new poems, his prewar promise was never realized. Yet he deserves more than a footnote. Neither Hyatt H. Waggoner, in his American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968), nor David Perkins, in his A History...