Peter Viereck


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

Background

Viereck was born in New York City, the 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, again from Harvard. Viereck was prolific in his writing from 1938. He published 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. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.
Viereck first taught during 1946–1947 at Smith College. In 1948 he joined the faculty at nearby Mount Holyoke College, also a women's college in Massachusetts. He taught history for nearly fifty years. He retired in 1987 but continued to teach his Russian history survey course there until 1997.
Viereck died on May 13, 2006 in South Hadley, Massachusetts after a prolonged illness.

Politics

Viereck in the 1940s 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:

Awards

In ''Poetry Magazine''