SOURCE: A review of Poetic License, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 307–08.

In the following review, Leddy offers a summary of Perloff's essays and arguments in Poetic License, noting unflattering similarities between Perloff's approach and that of F. R. Leavis.

Poetic License collects fifteen essays written between 1984 and 1989, all but three previously published. A glance at the acknowledgments suggests Marjorie Perloff's independence of critical camps and jargons: here is a critic at home in the pages of American Poetry Review and Sulfur, New Literary History and Temblor (and, for that matter, World Literature Today; see WLT 59:3, pp. 510–16). The essays undertake, in Perloff's words, “a revisionist history of twentieth-century poetics,” reexamining the canonical and making the case for work often considered marginal: Perloff writes not only about figures one might expect—Yeats, Stein, Beckett, Ashbery—but also about “language poets” such as Susan Howe and Steve McCaffery...