SOURCE: "A Poetry Chronicle," Poetry, Vol. 112, No. 5, August, 1968, pp. 337-43.

In the following review of New and Selected Poems: 1932-1967, Lierberman surveys Viereck's career commitment to both politics and poetry.

The career in poetry of Peter Viereck, perhaps more than that of any other writer of our time, can be viewed as an experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and politics. The New Cultural Blues, his best satire, draws on a complex linguistic and sociological intelligence. I can't recall when, if ever, these two cultures (language and social science) have been embraced by a more consolidating sensibility. His best satires are memorable events in the history of ideas, without loss of art.

Viereck's earliest poetry served him as an extension of political consciousness into a medium in which paramount ideas of our era could be abstracted from their worrisome contexts in international affairs and viewed freshly and intrinsically...