Although his work is not read much today, Peter Viereck was one of the leading American poets of the 1950s and 1960s. But Viereck did not limit himself to writing poetry; he also became an important voice as a cultural critic, arguing for a sophisticated, intellectual model of conservatism. As a poet, Viereck was conservative: he opposed what he viewed as excessive experimentation and obscurity, and advocated a return to form, to rhyme, and to simple lyrics. In this, he was going against the dominant movement in poetry at the time—the allusive, free-verse modernist verse written by such poets as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. "For An Assyrian Frieze" appeared in 1948, in Terror and Decorum, Viereck's first volume of poetry and one that won him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. "For An Assyrian Frieze" takes a cue from Pound in that the poet immerses himself in a long-ago time, but, unlike Pound, Viereck narrates this picture of Assyrian society in a very regular, formal verse. The portrait of the violent blood-lusting Assyrian society, synechdochized as the "lion with a prophet's beard," is ironic, given the calm regularity of the verse form. Such techniques characterize not only Viereck's poetry but also his ideas of cultural conservatism.