For forty years Marjorie Perloff has played a pivotal supporting role in a major literary story of our time: the academic embrace of vanguardist poetry. The main characters in this story are of course the poets themselves, but Perloff (1981: 44), one of the first academic critics to treat this work “on its own terms,” as she put it in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, has provided poets of what John Ashbery called “The Other Tradition” with a literary-historical legitimacy that neither the New Critics nor the culture of the Writing Workshop was prepared to give. Along the way, she has been an effective, if partial, deprovincializer of academic literary culture, insisting on the connection of American poetry to the European avant-garde, and has trained many students to continue this cosmopolitan engagement in their own projects.Now Perloff has written a book, Infrathin, that purports to look away from the academy, toward a general readership, and (mostly) backward in time, toward modernism rather than the contemporary moment to which she has devoted so much recent attention. The book is subtitled An Experiment in Micropoetics, by which she means “super-close reading,” or “reading for the visual and sonic as well as the verbal elements in a text, for the individual phoneme or letter as well as the larger semantic import” (xii). This experiment, which claims to depart both from merely “close” reading and from “art for art’s sake” by embracing “history, geography, and culture,” offers a “possible methodology” but also a defense of poetry, a way of showing what “makes poetry with a capital P so captivating and indispensable” (xii).Though Perloff’s book is oriented toward a sympathetic audience—“nonspecialist” readers who already agree that poetry “matters” (xii)—it also implies the need for an argument, or at least a clarification. Something has apparently gone wrong in our thinking about poetry, such that we need to show anew why it matters to us. Moreover, the usual method for making such a demonstration will no longer suffice; what’s needed is not poetics but micropoetics. Just exactly what has gone wrong, who it has gone wrong for, and why—these are important questions for understanding the stakes of the book. Such questions come into focus gradually, and what they reveal is that Infrathin is more complicated than it appears to be at first glance. There is more to it than Perloff’s claim that reading poetry is one of the “great . . . human pleasures” or, more modestly, that it might provide “an antidote to the unbearable news cycle and Twitter feed” (xii, xiii).The book begins by inverting traditional expectations about academics who write for a general readership: here it is the academic, and not the general, public that needs clarification, and the representative of that readership is Perloff herself. She explains that Infrathin was born when she was invited to write on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, whose continuing popularity, especially relative to his early work, mystified her, and whose exposition of Christian doctrine she had always found “contrived” (1). Returning to the text, however, she discovered, on what she calls the poem’s microlevel, “a brilliant verbal, visual, and sound structure” where, combined with etymology and homology, “everything in the poem relates to everything else in surprising and remarkable ways” (2).The poem’s microlevel—“every phoneme, every morpheme, word, phrase, rhythm, and syntactic contour” (2)—is the domain of what Perloff, following Marcel Duchamp, calls the “infrathin” (inframince). Duchamp used this word to describe situations in which small differences of time, space, and language become substantially, even decisively, significant. Reluctant to define the infrathin, Duchamp nevertheless provided some memorable examples, some of them “playful,” in Perloff’s estimation, and others that raise “larger issues about time, space, and especially language” (2). For instance: The warmth of a seat (which has just been left).When the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it, the two orders marry by infrathin.The infrathin separation between the detonation noise of a gun (very close) and the apparition of the bullet hole in the target.In time, [how] the same object is not the same after a one-second interval. (2–3)Or (a personal favorite not cited by Perloff): [T]he difference between the volumes of air displaced by a clean, pressed shirt and the same shirt, dirty. ([L]a différence entre les volumes d’air déplacé par une chemise propre (repassée et pliée) et la même chemise sale) (Duchamp 1966: 472–73)Such hyperspecific, fleeting, quasi-ineffable qualities became the object of Duchamp’s artistic interest, leading him away from the example of his contemporaries like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and placing him on the road to developing conceptual art. Perloff, who has written periodically about Duchamp’s infrathin since at least Twenty-First-Century Modernism (Perloff 2002b), recruits the concept, in which infinitesimal differences matter, to describe what makes poetry “poetry” and what makes great poetry great. “To be a poet,” Perloff writes, “is to draw on the verbal pool we all share but to choose one’s words and phrases with an eye to unexpected relationships—verbal, visual, sonic . . . that create infrathin possibilities” (Infrathin, 6).Born from a reconsideration of Eliot’s poetry, proceeding by means of a concept from Duchamp, offering detailed close readings and metrical analyses that would be at home in the classroom: all of this emphasizes that the target audience for Infrathin, despite its rhetoric, is basically an academic one. This is all the more apparent when we consider the body of the book, where Perloff follows her conception of infrathin poetic “making” into the modernist canon, and uses what she finds there to construct a revisionist history of the vanguard that will be familiar to readers of her scholarly work. Individual chapters claim that it is Duchamp, not Picasso, who is the major interlocutor for Gertrude Stein; that Eliot and Ezra Pound prefigure neither the theatricality of midcentury confessional poetry nor the absorption of the objectivists or Black Mountain poets, but concrete poetry from the United Kingdom and Brazil, respectively; that Wallace Stevens, too often viewed as a philosophical late Romantic, actually anticipates in his wordplay the textual experiments of his admirer Susan Howe; that, rather than see Ashbery as taking Stevens’s concerns with subjectivity to their logical conclusion, we should find his heirs among those who most forcefully reject the afterlife of the Romantic subject, namely, the language poets (represented by Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout). Finally, Samuel Beckett, whose poetry is regularly eclipsed by his famous novels and plays, gets his due as a poet through a superclose reading of Texts for Nothing and an elucidation of his evolving engagement with W. B. Yeats. (Indeed, in a move that provides a retrospective template for Perloff’s own reevaluation of Four Quartets, Beckett started out as a critic of Yeats’s rhetoric before coming to appreciate, and then revere, the older poet’s ear.)On the whole, the story that Infrathin tells through these pairings repositions modernist poetry away from its canonization by the New Critics and the attendant academic verse culture and toward a vanguardist writing whose origins can be plausibly found—at least from the vantage point of later, language-centered writing—in the linguistic turn.1 While Perloff has made this move before, its variation in Infrathin does represent the culmination of a significant shift in her thinking. Perloff’s influential work on Anglo-American poetry since the early 1980s proceeded from a strong opposition between a postsymbolist modernism, which she saw as petering out into a “scholastic exercise in metaphor making” (Perloff 2013: 23), and a Rimbaudian/Poundian modernism, which she saw as the source of what remained vital and interesting in contemporary poetry. The critic who sought to displace Empsonian “ambiguity” with the more radical “indeterminacy,” and famously threw down the gauntlet in essays like “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” (Perloff 1982),2 now suggests that Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, formerly exemplary postsymbolists, belong in conversation with writers like Pound, Beckett, and Howe. It turns out that the infrathin possibilities of modernist writing reveal that indeterminacy was more widely shared than Perloff thought. What initially presents itself as a defense of poetry for general readers is, in reality, the revision and extension of a specific intellectual project: the attempt to supplant the legacy of the New Criticism, not with historicism or cultural studies but with a vanguardist formalism. Micropoetics is this formalism’s method.▪ ▪ ▪There are many striking observations throughout Infrathin that corroborate Perloff’s claim that, in poetry, the smallest differences—particularly differences at the level of sound or even the letter—“may well be the heart of the matter” (27). Most of these observations are made about texts Perloff has written on before, but, for the most part, they remain fresh and surprising. In her comments on Goethe’s famous “Wandrers Nachtlied,” for instance, Perloff painstakingly scans the poem, finding that although no two lines “have the same rhythmic contour” (25), the poem is full of repeating sounds, and the division between self and world corresponds to a division within the poem’s soundscape. She is excellent on Duchamp’s wordplay in the titles of his readymades: Fresh Widow (1920), for example, made from a painted French window whose glass panels were covered with leather, is “a brilliant aural pun, made simply by erasing the letter N in both words. A ‘fresh widow’ is a recent one (here perhaps a war widow) but also ‘fresh’ in the sense of bold, not easy to repress or squelch” (42). Of Stevens’s “Course of a Particular”—a poem that she initially believed monotonous but then reevaluated, thanks to Howe’s interpretation of it—Perloff notes that “the repetition of the word ‘cry’ (it recurs nine times within the poem’s fifteen lines) offsets the monotony, the long harsh sound of cry, with its voiceless stop (k), fricative (r), and long open vowel (y), resounds in our consciousness, impossible to ignore” (135).Of course, for Perloff’s observations to do more than merely direct us toward “the heart of the matter,” we need some general sense of the matter that they are illuminating. It is here, in the nuts and bolts of argumentation, that the book runs into difficulty living up to its promises. Perloff’s engagement with Eliot provides a good example. Looking at the manuscript of “Little Gidding,” she observes that in early drafts he began the poem with “Midwinter summer is its own season” before revising it into the famous “Midwinter spring is its own season.” Perloff explains the significance of the change: Eliot evidently opted for spring, not only because spring is the season of Resurrection, but also because his revised line—“Midwinter spring is its own season”—with its five short i’s, gives him a near-anagram on the title of his poem, Little Gidding. The name contains 3 i’s, two l’s, two t’s, two g’s, two d’s, and an n. Line 1 spins variations on this pattern, “Midwinter spring is its own season” containing five of the same phonemes—short i, d, g, t, and n. And further, spring rhymes with ing in “Gidding,” and season echoes own. Everything coalesces and comes together for a brief revelatory moment. (76)This attention to the microlevel of Eliot’s verse is ingenious. It does indeed show us things that we might not have known, or noticed, about Eliot’s poem. (I had never considered the repetition of most of the phonemes from the title of the poem in its first line.) Insofar as the project of criticism is to observe or reveal, Perloff’s book excels. But the important questions, especially for a “micropoetic” analysis, are why and to what extent the observations or revelations actually matter. Perloff’s “not only . . . but also . . . ” construction alerts us to the fact that, rather than discovering something about the macro in the micro (an association that she, in fairness, never exactly claims, but one that is implied by the term), she has found something on the microlevel in addition to the macro. As she acknowledges, there are important semantic and thematic reasons—“poetic” reasons rather than “micropoetic” ones—why Eliot might have settled on spring rather than summer. If that is the case, then the relationship of sound to sense here might be derivative and subordinate, an argument at least as old as Alexander Pope: “’Tis not enough no harshness gives offense, / The sound must seem an echo to the sense.”Now, read against the grain, Pope’s famous lines do leave open the possibility—one known to everyone who has ever written a poem—that some words or lines are initially chosen for their sound effects and that their sound’s seeming to echo their meaning is itself a product of what Pope called “true art.” Perloff quotes a letter from Eliot to Stephen Spender to this effect: “My theory of writing verse is that one gets a rhythm, and a movement first, and fills it in with some approximation to sense later” (69). But in order for there to be some account of why such words are chosen and kept, independently of their meaning—in order to rationalize such choices—you need a theory of the micropoetic significance of sound as sound, rather than of sound as an auxiliary to sense. Perloff doesn’t supply such a theory. Instead, she leans on Eliot’s concept of “the auditory imagination,” “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back” (69), which is less a theory than an evocative description of how Eliot thought he was working. But there are numerous places that a theory of sound in poems could be found: in Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s (2007) claims about lyric poetry’s echo of the loss of preverbal wholeness; in Simon Jarvis’s (1998) argument for the cognitive potential of prosody; in J. H. Prynne’s (2010) conception of “mental ears.”3 Without such a theory, it seems unlikely that the sounds of language in poems could be separated from sense in a decisive way, such that they could matter as much as sense. Even Jakobson, writing about the famous campaign slogan “I like Ike,” in which the various forms of wordplay reinforce the primary, communicative function of the slogan by means of Freudian images of envelopment, ends up in pretty much the same place as Pope and Perloff: the meaning of the slogan establishes the structure by which the significance of its sound becomes legible as reinforcement (Jakobson 1987). In Perloff’s own analysis, that structural role is played not by sound but by the semantics and thematics of Eliot’s poem, channeled almost perfectly by her gloss “Everything coalesces and comes together for a brief revelatory moment.”All of this matters because, if the micropoetic is determined or constrained by the poetic, then Perloff’s claim to depart from New Critical verbal analysis, which she touts at the beginning of her book (and which she has touted elsewhere), does not hold up. Indeed, on a macrolevel Infrathin, in the service of noticing things about poems that contribute in all sorts of ways to their being aesthetically engaging, makes something of the same conceptual mistake that The Poetics of Indeterminacy did when it implied a categorical distinction between its preferred term and ambiguity. The upshot of Perloff’s discovery that postsymbolists, Poundians, and vanguardists belong together may be that she and the New Criticism belong together, too, and that the academic approach to modernist poetry pioneered by the New Critics turns out to have been the productive formula for Perloff’s own treatment of the vanguard for decades. The distance from “everything coalesces and comes together for a brief revelatory moment” to, say, Cleanth Brooks’s (1947: 203) remark that a poem is a “pattern of resolved stresses” is less a journey than Perloff generally wants to admit. It’s a difference in degree, not in kind, and the benefits and the drawbacks of one are shared by the other.4This continuity between Perloff and the New Criticism may account for an important feature of her treatment of Duchamp, which is to approach him as a traditional artist and the infrathin as, essentially, a description of the aesthetic experience produced by artworks traditionally conceived. But Duchamp is a notoriously paradoxical and transitional figure. A maker of traditional artworks early in his career, he throws the whole idea of the artwork into question with his mature work. Fountain is obviously not a traditional sculpture, carefully wrought by the artist’s toil. It is a mass-produced object, repositioned. It became contingently unique when it was flipped and signed “R. Mutt,” but there were, and are, plenty of identical urinals with which one can do the same thing (many copies of Fountain are on display in museums around the world; the first one was destroyed). Although Fountain does plausibly resemble, in the words of Carl Van Vechten (1986: 58–59), “everything from a Madonna to a Buddha,” any resemblance is arguably secondary to the gesture of turning a urinal into a work of art in the first place. To borrow a term from Walter Benjamin (2010: 1053), Fountain has no aura, no unique “here and now.” It loses little in being photographed—indeed, its being photographed was an essential component of its success. The emphasis on exhibition value changes the function of art. No longer primarily a site of aesthetic experience, Fountain assumes a conceptual and political purpose. Among the questions it asks are: what is art, and who gets to decide this—especially in a society where the line between art and the commodity form has vanished?Perloff, however, treats Duchamp’s work as a reaffirmation of the traditional view, rebaptizing it into the realm of cult value. She takes his famously “indifferent” stance toward aesthetic questions, and his resulting antagonism toward the traditional work of art, to be something of an enabling pretense (Perloff 2012), writing of the readymades that “gradually, such ‘conceptual’ works would come to be recognized as ‘works of art,’ comparable to their seemingly antithetical counterparts” (Infrathin, 10).5 I leave it to the art historians to decide whether this recognition is, in fact, a misrecognition, whether it does justice to an artist whose aim “is neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both” (Foster 1996: 18). For my purposes, the description of the readymades is crucial, because it lays bare an essential feature in Perloff’s thinking: she embraces early twentieth-century vanguardism only insofar as it revises rather than rejects the concept of the “work of art.” The social function of that work—what Benjamin (2010: 1057) saw as fundamentally changed by technology, such that art itself experienced “a qualitative transformation in its nature,” a transformation that vanguardist authors also recognized6—is held in abeyance. Perloff’s is a vanguardism whose revolutionary energies are essentially confined to the aesthetic sphere, whereas it seems that much of the point of vanguardism was (is?) to leave that sphere behind.Such a circumscription of vanguardist ambitions, the maintenance of a boundary between art and society, may account for Perloff’s preferences and aversions over the years. Some of the vanguardist poets she has not embraced, such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Ted Berrigan, have professed a more variegated and less aestheticist account of what they are doing with their poetry. One thinks here, too, of the relative absence of major writers of color from her writing, figures whom one might reasonably expect to find there, given their interest in experimenting with language: Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, M. NourbeSe Philip, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen.7 Perloff’s aestheticized vanguardism cannot address poetic projects for which the actual transformation of society by means of art is felt to be both possible and necessary. This limitation crops up in Infrathin’s micropoetics and distorts her interpretative practice: while some of her readings are too close, others are not nearly close enough. For instance, Perloff concludes a rich chapter on Pound, in which she recapitulates many of his experiments with prosody, by looking at a famous passage from canto 74, where the poet reports on the execution of a fellow prisoner who turns out to be Louis Till, father of Emmett. Perloff is struck by Pound’s being on friendly terms with Till and suggests that the Chinese ideogram in the passage, glossed by the Homeric “OY TI∑,” as well as the ideogram’s translation as “a man on whom the sun has gone down,” refers not only to the despondent poet but to both men. Perloff writes that “narrator and character merge in a spatial construct that telescopes at least seven different time periods” and that, “given the impossibility of distinguishing between the two, the reader is forced to wonder whether and when the poet himself might face execution” (119). Of course, Pound is using Louis Till as a character to meditate on his own fate, which he finds (and wants us to find) similarly bleak and sympathetic. This on its own might invite criticism. But there is more: Perloff, in her reading, glosses over the important line “Pisa, in the 23rd year of the effort in sight of the tower,” which she says merely “refers to the Italian Fascist calendar” (118). The line characterizes Italian fascism as an undertaking linked to the glorious Renaissance past, an effort that has been hijacked, in Pound’s mind, by the American military. Indeed, by comparing himself with Louis Till—who, it turns out, was likely the victim of racially motivated charges and whose execution at the hands of the army played a role in the posthumous smear campaign orchestrated against his son—Pound confirms some of the racial prejudices that we might expect a committed fascist to have. Rather than drill down into the micropoetics of fascism, surely an urgent topic for our own political moment, Perloff largely ignores it. Is this consistent with an approach to poetry in which “every word counts” (113)? Or does Perloff mean something else in her claims throughout this book for the significance of the microlevel?▪ ▪ ▪Here we return to the question of what has gone wrong in discussions of contemporary poetry, such that Perloff felt it necessary to intervene in this fashion. Obviously, her own reconsiderations of Eliot and Stevens as artists played a role. But these revisions end up buttressing, rather than contesting, her core convictions, and thus reconsideration in general doesn’t seem to be the point. Perloff suggests in places that current trends in academic criticism may be headed in the wrong direction; she points out in passing, for example, that the renewed attention of poetry scholars to genre may not be helpful for twentieth-century writing that so thoroughly refused generic categories. This is not a strong argument. Mountains of evidence—much of it supplied in different ways and to different purposes by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (2014), Gillian White (2014), and Jonathan Culler (2015)—affirm the importance of the generic category of the lyric for twentieth-century poetry, both as standard and as scapegoat. Perloff, moreover, weds much of her analysis to textbook foot-substitution prosody as if it were a timeless and self-evident reading practice, ignoring important work in the emerging field of historical poetics that complicates such a stance.8If, on the whole, the gesture to right the ship of scholarship can thus seem desultory, Perloff’s likely target comes into view later, in the middle of Infrathin: “Poetry,” Pound declared in the ABC of Reading, is “the most concentrated form of verbal expression”; it is “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” and hence “News that STAYS news.” These formulations have become so well known that they are almost clichés, but it is worth remembering, in our politicized moment when expressive and didactic theories of poetry are once again dominant, that if poetry were not a special form of discourse, it would be hardly worth reading and writing: we have plenty of other forms of discourse that grapple with ideas, with argumentation. It is not a question of art for art’s sake, but poetry is unique in being the art form that conveys its meanings, which are often highly complex, by means of intense language, soundscape, and visual design. “Dichten = condensare.” (98; emphasis mine)Carried away, perhaps, by an aversion to didacticism—a curious position for an admirer of Pound, surely one of the greatest didactic poets of the twentieth century—Perloff misfires here. Going back at least to Horace, there is a robust tradition of treating poetry as a means of argumentation, one that includes major twentieth-century poets like Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and that lives today in the work of poets like Pinsky and Robert Hass. Moreover, the fact that we have plenty of other forms of discourse that deal with ideas and argumentation is, for many, all the more reason to think of poetry as “special” in expressivist terms. The real source of Perloff’s concern here seems to be a change in the standard of literary taste. It’s not just that, as she complained a decade ago, the Establishment produces “self-regarding sludge that passes for poetry” (Perloff 2012). Something has happened on an intellectual level: “Expressive and didactic theories of poetry are once again dominant” (Infrathin, 98). Since the only place where these theories have not been dominant recently is in a particular corner of the academy, one assumes that she refers to collective endorsements of journals, MFA programs, prize committees, and the sundry other institutions of the Program Era—places that were, for a time, more hospitable to the kind of poetry Perloff admired, and more willing to depart from the norms of what Bernstein (1985: 246) called “Official Verse Culture.”Perloff rightly senses that this change in the academic standard of taste is a challenge to her project. However, this standard is in flux for reasons more complicated than her gesture toward “our politicized moment” can capture (and which moment of American history has not been politicized?).9 One of those reasons, which Perloff lamented in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, is the rise of cultural studies and its general effect on the study of literature. But the focus on cultural studies fails to see the problem embedded in establishing an academic standard of taste in the first place. On the one hand, the contemporary university is a major patron of the arts, and nowhere more powerful as a patron than in arts such as poetry, where the marketplace plays a negligible role. On the other, the raison d’être of the contemporary university is the production of knowledge, and the production of knowledge is bound up with projects of demystification. In such a space of demystification, to insist that poetry is a special form of discourse—rather than a function that all discourse has, to a greater or lesser extent—is a dubious proposition. (One finds intense language, soundscape, and visual design in things that are not poetry, like prose narrative.)10 To further imply, as Perloff does, that aesthetic judgments of this special form of discourse can persist more or less untouched by the demystifications of ideology critique and the sociology of knowledge—that we can speak of “great” poetry, or poetry “with a capital P,” at all without specifying what we really mean by this, and what the implications might be of our so meaning it—is even more dubious. Perloff acknowledges that evaluative claims are “taboo” (xii) but doesn’t try to do anything to prevent those claims from being totemic. Though we may love poetry, this is not the way to remain intellectually serious about it.11If Perloff feels recent changes as a loss more than other critics do, perhaps it is because she was more personally involved in the struggle than they were to shape contemporary poetry. In Unoriginal Genius Perloff proposed that conceptual poetry was the latest iteration of the vanguardist tradition that included the language poets and stretched back to her favored conception of modernism. She presented this as an advance: language writers, despite appearances, had retained an investment in verbal originality that wedded it to the midcentury milieu they had so strenuously critiqued; conceptual poetry, by doing away with verbal originality as a desideratum, had taken the critique of poetic subjectivity farther than the language poets did, and thus it could be said to have inaugurated something new (Perloff 2010: 11). This analysis, which seemed to fly in the face of the modernist aesthetic criteria Perloff had used to legitimate the vanguardist tradition—how difficult it was (and is) to see conceptual poetry as language “charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” as Pound’s or Stevens’s or Beckett’s language is so charged—has come to very little, at least in the poetry world.12 Conceptualism ran its course: eight years ago Felix Bernstein (2015: 38) already could define “Post conceptualist poetry” as an attempt “to explicitly bring affect, emotion, and ego back into the empty networking structures that govern us.” After more than a century of critiques of the subject, it seems that subjectivity is still with us.The rise and abrupt fall of conceptual poetry must have been a bruising experience for a critic who famously said, in an interview with Antoine Cazé, “I like to pick the winners—to see who ‘the great ones’ are,” and “I think, on the whole, that time has sanctioned most of my choices” (Perloff 2013: 42). In the same interview Perloff affirmed that she is a historian of poetry, someone who wants “to try to understand what it is that has happened and why” (42). But Infrathin shows that the critic in Perloff is much stronger than the historian. Surely someone who considered herself a historian of poetry would try to understand why didactic and expressivist theories are resurgent in some poetic quarters, rather than stand athwart literary history asking that resurgence to stop. If Infrathin is not exactly a career reset, it is perhaps best seen as a (mostly sublimated) reaction to the challenging of a major critic’s taste and position. The book underscores just how much this critic, confronted with this challenge, looks to the past. For Perloff, there was never any question of moving beyond the New Criticism. Instead, she brought it forward in time, swapping French symbolism for the English seventeenth century and using this matrix to account for a larger variety of twentieth-century poetic styles. Such was her own stroke of “unoriginal” genius. It allowed her to do much for the poetry she admired and to influence the standing of that poetry in the academy. But her repetition limited her as well: like her predecessors, she committed herself to an essentialist theory of poetry and appealed to a preferred set of touchstones that exemplify it. Her sense of literary history remained fixed in an eternal return to the early vanguard, letting her subtly conflate the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement with the objectivity of what came to pass, while remaining silent on the history and social structures that underwrote both. These are limitations that the current generation of literary critics, a generation that owes much to Perloff, will need to transcend, at least if they, too, wish to “make it new.”
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