From the Publisher
An affirmation from Michael A. Weinstein of HUMANITAS:"In TIDE AND CONTINUITIES, Peter Viereck shows himself to be a formidable philosophical poet of the sort that Santayana had in mind in THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS (Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe). His cosmic drama is in the form of extended meditative dialogues on death and dying carried through a series of long and ambitious poems, in which the figures (voices) of Dionysus, Persephone, and Pluto are an uneasily but deeply held belief in the finitude of individuated human consciousness. Viereck is a civilized humanist, just like Babbitt, Ortega, and Santayana (writers whom Viereck likes to cite in his prose works), but he is of a later generation that was tempered by WWII and turned existentialist. In an important sense, Peter Viereck is a civilized existentialist.