'The Poem That Hurtles from Heights Unknown'

“I must disappoint many readers by the unexciting conservatism of my poetic techniques. After experimenting with more easygoing prosodies, I've found it more effective to adhere to the admittedly arbitrary laws of conventional rhyme and meter.” 

In “My Kind of Poetry,” published in the August 27, 1949 issue of The Saturday Review, Peter Viereck responds to the Ezra Pound Affair. Two months earlier, Robert Hillyer had published two lengthy articles in the magazine examining the poet, anti-Semite, traitor and mental patient. While under indictment for treason and hospitalized in St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, Mussolini’s mouthpiece had been awarded the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress for The Pisan Cantos – the same year Viereck won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book of poems, Terror and Decorum. Viereck notes that he was “serving against Fascism as an American sergeant in the Italian campaign at the very time when Ezra Pound was comfortably broadcasting his Fascism and treason from Mussolini's Ministry of Propaganda.”

 

While broadcasting for Radio Rome in 1943, with the Holocaust well underway, Pound declared: “I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yids.” He is an early specimen of a type familiar today: the artist entitled, because he is an artist, to mouth off on any subject, especially those about which he knows nothing and is most deluded. The least interesting aspect of any poet – any human, come to think of it – is his roll call of opinions. Just write your verse and shut up.

 

Viereck’s essay is a professional apologia. He’s a fascinating, largely forgotten figure – a conservative thinker who never found a home. He was utterly independent. In “My Kind of Poetry” he writes: “It’s not enough to say: a poet must belong to none of the arty coteries. It's essential that he actively sin against their rituals.” My kind of thinker, poetically, politically and otherwise. Viereck’s essay reminds me of a poem published five years earlier, Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Poem”:

 

“Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud,

with its linden tree in India ink

and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;

 

“nor the mirror in you and her delicate bare

shoulder still glimmering there;

not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme --

the tiny music that tells the time;

 

“and not the pennies and weights on those

evening papers piled up in the rain;

not the cacodemons of carnal pain;

not the things you can say so much better in plain prose --

 

“but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown

-- when you wait for the splash of the stone

deep below, and grope for your pen,

and then comes the shiver, and then --

 

“in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,

the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds

fuse and form a silent, intense

mimetic pattern of perfect sense.”

 

“The Poem” appears in the June 10, 1944 issue of The New Yorker -- the issue on the stands when the Allies were landing at Normandy on D-Day. The editors of Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, add a footnote to the poem from Nabokov’s January 8, 1944 letter to Charles Pearce, poetry editor of The New Yorker: “It’s about landscape verse, love verse, political verse and real verse.”

A cacodemon is an evil spirit. “Shiver” must count as one of Nabokov’s favorite words, usually in connection with artistic creation. “The things you can say so much better in plain prose” is a polite epitaph for most free verse. Nabokov, by the way, dismissed Pound as "a total fake" who wrote "pretentious nonsense."