SOURCE: A review of The Dance of the Intellect, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, October, 1988, p. 988–89.

In the following review of The Dance of the Intellect, Corcoran finds shortcomings in Perloff's thesis and tendency toward polemic.

The title of this book [The Dance of the Intellect] is liable to suggest a coherence which its form in fact belies. A collection of previously-published essays on a range of writers from Pound himself to Williams, Oppen, Beckett, John Cage, and the recent American ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ poets, it never clearly argues for the kinds of continuity or interrelationship one might expect in a study claiming to consider a ‘tradition’. What Marjorie Perloff means by ‘poetry of the Pound tradition’ is poetry (not necessarily indebted to Pound, or even in any way acknowledging him) which runs counter to the assumptions of the Romantic-Symboliste-Modernist...