SOURCE: A review of Radical Artifice, in College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2, June, 1994, pp. 165–70.

In the following review, Palatella analyzes Perloff's revisionist literary history and theoretical positions in Radical Artifice and other previous works. According to Palatella, Perloff's oppositional dichotomy of modern and postmodern literature is unnecessarily reductive and partisan.

For the past twenty years Marjorie Perloff has indefatigably committed herself to writing what she calls in Poetic License “a revisionist history of twentieth-century poetics” (2). In the mid-1970s, Perloff's essays on Ashbery, Beckett, Pound, and Stein appeared in American Poetry Review, Parnassus, and Iowa Review. Brought together with discussions of Rimbaud, Cage, and Williams, they were incorporated into The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Perloff promoted the value of poetry as “compositional rather than referential … ‘such that’ the focus shifts from signification to the play of signifiers” (23). This meant saying goodbye to the well-wrought urns of Auden, Eliot, Stevens, and...