SOURCE: “Responsiveness to Lyric and the Critic's Responsibilities,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 580–87.

In the following review, Altieri praises Poetic License, but takes issue with Perloff's historical perspective and attitude toward subjective expression.

Marjorie Perloff's Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric offers superb literary criticism—clear, lively, learned, passionate, vigorously opinionated, and stunningly discriminating on what is worth being opinionated about. Perloff's keen observation that Allen Ginsberg's poems have “an extraordinary sense of the moment, of being, so to speak, at the center of the vortex” (215) is for me the perfect emblem for her own criticism.

Perloff's learning is doubly impressive. A true comparatist, Perloff is so broad in her knowledge of poetry and modern cultural history that she demands our viewing our own literature for its place within larger international concerns and movements. Yet she wields her learning deftly and gracefully, without ever...