Peter R. Viereck, 89; Pulitzer-Winning Poet Spurned by Fellow Conservatives

Peter R. Viereck, a historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and political philosopher who was spurned by the modern conservative movement despite his central role in its birth, died May 13 at his home in South Hadley, Mass., after a long illness. He was 89.

Viereck was the author of nine volumes of poetry, including “Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940-1948,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, and “Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles of 1967-1987,” an epic poem 20 years in the writing.

A professor of history who taught at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for 50 years, he was close to Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet, who considered Viereck “perhaps the greatest rhymer” of the modern era.

Viereck also was a political thinker, whose provocative 1949 book, “Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt,” defined the modern conservative movement.

“This was the book which, more than any other of the early postwar era, created the new conservatism as a self-conscious intellectual force,” historian George H. Nash wrote in his 1976 book, “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America.”

“It was this book which boldly used the word ‘conservatism’ in its title -- the first such book after 1945. At least as much as any of his contemporaries,” Nash wrote, “Peter Viereck popularized the term ‘conservative’ and gave the nascent movement its label.”

Last year, Viereck was featured in a New Yorker magazine profile that renewed interest in his political writing from the 1940s and ‘50s. Called “The First Conservative: How Peter Viereck Inspired -- and Lost -- a Movement,” the October 2005 article by Tom Reiss provoked heated reaction from the mainline conservative journal National Review.

“The true story is that Viereck was onstage during the creation of modern conservatism, but only in the opening scene,” National Review political reporter John J. Miller wrote. “Then he walked away, never to be heard from again, except occasionally as a heckler.”

Born in New York City in 1916, Viereck was the older of two sons of George Sylvester Viereck, a poet and journalist who interviewed Adolf Hitler and became known as a Nazi propagandist. He was convicted in 1941 of conspiring with the Nazis and spent four years in federal prison.

Viereck, then in graduate studies at Harvard (where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and, in 1942, his PhD in history), found his father’s activities repugnant and broke off relations for the next 16 years.

He spent World War II writing intelligence reports in Africa and Italy for the Army’s Psychological Warfare Branch. He was also writing poems, several of which were published in the New Yorker.

When his younger brother, George Sylvester Jr., was killed in action in Italy, he wrote a poem about it called “Vale from Carthage,” which began: “And what if one of us / I asked last May, in fun, in gentleness, / Wears doom, like dungarees, and doesn’t know?”

After the war, Viereck married a Russian resistance fighter, Anya de Markov, and started a family.

He is survived by his two children from that marriage, John and Valerie; his second wife, Betty Falkenberg; three grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

In 1949, he set the intellectual foundation for conservatism in “Conservatism Revisited.”

“The conservative principles par excellence,” he wrote, “are proportion and measure; self-expression through selfrestraint.”

An anti-communist who was anti-McCarthy, he opposed political extremism and supported Adlai Stevenson for president.

As Viereck told the New Yorker last year, he thought his book “opened minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.” But, referring to William F. Buckley, who wrote a passionate defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954 and founded National Review in 1955, “once their minds were opened, Buckley came in.”

In the 1960s, Viereck turned away from politics and focused on teaching history and writing poetry. He was believed to have been the only American to win a Guggenheim fellowship in both history and poetry.

He traveled in Russia and brought Brodsky to Mount Holyoke in 1981. Together they taught a course called “Poets Under Totalitarianism,” which Viereck jokingly referred to as “Rhyme and Punishment.”

His poetry earned mixed reviews over the years, with some critics hailing the lyrical quality of his work and others wishing for more polish. His poems were challenging and unpredictable.

Because Viereck wrote rhymed verse, Andrew Glaze, in a review of “New and Selected Poems 1932-1967,” wrote that it was “hard to imagine a poet more out of style at this moment than Peter Viereck.” Yet, he noted, “no one has created more wonderful poems out of near-doggerel rhythms and unlikely rhymes, as though from the pure pleasure of barely skirting disaster.”

Viereck seemed to agree with the last sentiment, writing in his final collection, “Tides and Continuities” (1995):

A poet is someone who skims ever weightier

Stones ever farther on water.