SOURCE: A review of The Poetics of Indeterminacy, in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 64–70.

In the following review, Steiner criticizes what she considers to be specious arguments and inaccurate semiotic analysis in The Poetics of Indeterminacy.

It is hard not to admire the courage of Marjorie Perloff's work. She sets out to do nothing less than recast the modernist canon, writing with evident pleasure of poets disdained for their incoherence and exclusively cerebral appeal. Drawn forth from obscurity and isolation, these sports of art become themselves a fecund species, a line fully as productive as the Romanticist-Symbolist dynasty to which they are contrasted. Moreover, once identified, this “Other Tradition” begins to encroach on its High Modernist opposite, claiming Pound, Williams, and Beckett as its own, the heirs or coevals of the likes of Rimbaud, Stein, Apollinaire, Ashbery, Cage, and Antin...