"For An Assyrian Frieze" appeared in 1948 in Terror and Decorum, Peter Viereck's first volume of poetry and one that won him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Terror and Decorum was not Viereck's first published book, however; in 1941, while still a graduate student at Harvard, Viereck published Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler. Critics and readers have understood Viereck's work to be a reaction against the modernist orthodoxy represented most forcefully by T.S. Eliot, and this is largely because Viereck explained his own work, over and over again, as being such a reaction.

Notwithstanding his opposition to the dominance of Eliot, Viereck's first volume of poetry was instantly hailed as the work of one of America's most promising poets. In the Saturday Review of Literature, Selden Rodman wrote that although none of the individual poems in the book was immediately remarkable for its brilliance, "his book...