SOURCE: "Peter Viereck's Cross," The New Leader, Vol. LXX, No. 11, August 10-24, 1987, pp. 16-17.

In the following review, Pettingell examines the grand ambitions of Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles and concludes that Viereck identifies art with morality.

Two decades ago, Peter Viereck began writing an epic cycle of poems about man's attempts to come to terms with a confusing world and its presiding deity, if any. To call such a project risky would be an understatement. In the first place, the very theme brings to mind the greatest works of Dante, Milton and Goethe—formidable competition! In the second place, long poems were especially unfashionable at the time. Even a writer as popular as Robert Lowell found little audience for his History sonnet sequence (republished as Notebooks to sound more spontaneous and fragmented). Viereck believes his own poems were unacceptable to the "literary establishment" because of...