SOURCE: A review of Terror and Decorum, The Commonweal, Vol. L, No. 17, August 5, 1949, p. 418.

In the following review of Terror and Decorum, Johnston connects Viereck's first volume of poetry with his study of history and concludes that he is an author "perhaps a little too full" of theories.

"Excursions of the visceral and irrational into the prose realm of politics and economics," writes Peter Viereck in this, (Terror and Decorum Poems 1940-1948) his first volume of collected poetry, "are either silly or sinister." That such excursions may not only be sinister, but catastrophic as well, is the message of Viereck's rather breezy analysis of the origins of Nazism, published in 1941 under the title Metapolítics: From the Romantics to Hitler.

In the present volume of poetry the theme of opposition between the "visceral and irrational" and the disciplines of sanity and control is more concisely, though no less...