SOURCE: A review of The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell, in American Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3, November, 1974, pp. 414–15.

In the following review of The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell, Duffey objects to Perloff's assertions concerning Lowell's realism.

Anyone consulting Marjorie Perloff's study of Robert Lowell will profit by paying attention to her title [The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell]. She in fact does largely concentrate on questions pertinent to the means of Lowell's poetic expression and pays only slight attention to other matters. If, however, she largely passes up such important questions as those of development, thematic range, poetical associations and inheritance, and even some aspects of Lowell's complex expressive act in itself, she does provide a useful, perhaps even very useful suggestion about what, most immediately and characteristically, Lowell has sought to get into a poem.

The heart of her contribution would seem to lie in a redefinition...