Peter Viereck


Peter Robert Edwin Viereck was an American writer, poet, and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for Terror and Decorum, a collection of poetry. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.

Early life and education

Viereck was born in New York City, on August 5, 1916, son of George Sylvester Viereck. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 1937. He then specialized in European history, receiving his M.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942, both from Harvard.

Career

Viereck was prolific in his writing from 1938, publishing collections of poems, some first published in Poetry Magazine. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum.
Viereck taught at Smith College in 1946 and 1947. In 1948, he joined the faculty at nearby Mount Holyoke College, where he taught history for nearly fifty years. He retired in 1987, but continued to teach his Russian history survey course there until 1997.

Politics

In the 1940s, Viereck was an early leader in the conservative movement but by 1951 felt that it had strayed from true conservatism. This is reflected in his review of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, The New York Times, November 4, 1951). In April 1940, Viereck wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly, partly in reaction against the ideologies of his father, George Sylvester Viereck, a Nazi sympathizer.
His beliefs are difficult to categorize as they raise questions about what "conservative" really means:
According to Tom Reiss, Viereck was right, as he wrote in Conservatism Revisited, that he "had 'opened people's minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.' But, he said, 'once their minds were opened, Buckley came in'." In a review of Buckley's 1950 book God and Man at Yale, Viereck wrote:
In 1962, he elaborated upon the differences he saw between real conservatives and those he called pseudo-conservatives. He wrote of
In January 2006, Viereck offered this analysis:

Death

Viereck died on May 13, 2006, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, following a prolonged illness.

Awards

  • 1949: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Terror and Decorum
  • Guggenheim Fellowships in poetry and history

    Works

In ''Poetry Magazine''

  • "Graves Are Made to Waltz On," Volume 56, July 1940, Page 185
  • "Sonnet for Servants of the Word," Volume 68, September 1946, Page 302
  • "Vale," from Carthage, Volume 70, July 1947, Page 182
  • "Five Theological Cradle-Songs," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115
  • "Better Come Quietly," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115
  • "Why Can't I Live Forever?," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115
  • "Blindman's Buff," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115
  • "Game Called on Account of Darkness," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115
  • "Hide and Seek," Volume 71, December 1947, Page 115
  • "A Sort of Redemption," Volume 72, August 1948, Page 238
  • "Elegy to All Sainthood Everywhere," Volume 72, August 1948, Page 238
  • "Love Song of Judas Smith," Volume 74, August 1949, Page 256
  • "Again, Again!," Volume 80, April 1952, Page 6
  • "Girl-Child Pastoral," Volume 81, October 1952, Page 80
  • "Nostalgia," Volume 82, April 1953, Page 18
  • "Benediction," Volume 85, February 1955, Page 255
  • "A Walk on Moss," Volume 87, October 1955, Page 1
  • "We Ran All the Way Home," Volume 96, August 1960, Page 265

    Poetry collections

  • 1948: Terror and Decorum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949
  • 1949: The Poet in the Machine Age
  • 1950: Strike Through the Mask! New Lyrical Poems
  • 1952:
  • 1953: Dream and Responsibility: Four Test Cases of the Tension Between Poetry and Society
  • 1954: The Last Decade in Poetry: New Dilemmas and New Solutions
  • 1956: The Persimmon Tree: new pastoral and lyrical poems
  • 1961: The Tree Witch: A Poem and Play
  • 1967: New and Selected Poems: 1932-1967
  • 1987: Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles of 1967-1987
  • 1995: Tide and continuities: Last and First Poems, 1995-1938
  • 2005: Door: Poems
  • 2005: ''Strict Wildness: Discoveries In Poetry And History''

    Intellectual history

  • 1941. Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler. A. A. Knopf.
  • *Revised and enlarged edition published by Capricorn Books in 1965 as Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind.
  • *Expanded edition published by Transaction Publishers in 2004 as Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler.
  • 1949. Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, Transaction Publishers .
  • 1953. Dream and Responsibility: Four Test Cases of the Tension between Poetry and Society, University Press of Washington.
  • 1953. Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, Beacon Press .
  • 1956. Van Nostrand.
  • * Conservative Thinkers: From John Adams to Winston Churchill, Transaction Publishers, 2005.
  • 1956. The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans, Beacon Press .
  • * Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment: Where History and Literature Intersect, Transaction Publishers, 2004.
  • 1957. Inner Liberty: The Stubborn Grit in the Machine, Pendle Hill.
  • 2011. Strict Wildness: Discoveries in Poetry and History, Transaction Publishers.

    Select articles

  • , The Atlantic Monthly, April 1940.
  • "On Conservatism: Two Notes," American Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3, Autumn, 1949.
  • "Soviet-German Collaboration," The Forum, August 1949.
  • "The Decline & Immortality of Europe," The Saturday Review, March 3, 1951.
  • "Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals," The Reporter, May 27, 1952.
  • "Sunrise in the West," The Saturday Review, June 12, 1954.
  • "The New American Radicals," The Reporter, December 1954 Rep. in .
  • "The Unadjusted Man," The Saturday Review, November 1, 1958.
  • "The Crack-Up of American Optimism," Modern Age, Summer 1960.
  • "The Split Personality of Soviet Literature," The Reporter, March 15, 1962.
  • "Metapolitics Revisited," Humanitas, Volume XVI, No. 2, 2003.

    Obituaries

  • , The Guardian
  • , The Boston Globe
  • , The New York Times, May 19, 2006
  • - Forbes
Category:1916 births
Category:2006 deaths
Category:20th-century American historians
Category:American literary critics
Category:20th-century American poets
Category:American political writers
Category:Horace Mann School alumni
Category:Harvard College alumni
Category:Mount Holyoke College faculty
Category:Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners
Category:American male poets
Category:American people of German descent
Category:American male non-fiction writers
Category:American anti-communists
Category:Historians from New York
Category:20th-century American male writers
Category:Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni