SOURCE: A review of The Poetics of Indeterminacy, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 82, No. 2, April, 1983, pp. 215–18.

In the following review, Butterick commends the ambition of The Poetics of Indeterminacy, but criticizes what he sees as Perloff's unconvincing arguments and loose interdisciplinary approach.

This [The Poetics of Indeterminacy] is a praiseworthy attempt to engage an important development in recent Anglo-American poetry and to find ways to measure it. Perloff believes that there have been buried in Modernism “two separate though often interwoven strands: the Symbolist mode that Lowell inherited from Eliot and Baudelaire and, beyond them, from the great Romantic poets, and the ‘anti-Symbolist’ mode of indeterminacy or ‘undecidability,’ of literalness and free play, whose first real exemplar was the Rimbaud of the Illuminations.” She calls this the “other tradition,” borrowing her term from the title of one of John Ashbery's poems. It is a tradition...