SOURCE: A review of The Dance of the Intellect, in American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 1, March, 1987, pp. 139–40.

In the following review, Kronick gives a negative assessment of The Dance of the Intellect.

Perloff [in The Dance of the Intellect] contends that Post-Modernism is distinguished by the abandonment of genre, particularly that of lyric, in favor of the “art of writing,” which for her is embodied in the fragmentary and heterogeneous character of the Cantos. Her book begins with a group of essays dealing with the relation of Pound's poetics to Joyce's and Stevens'. She then turns to the metric techniques of Williams' and Oppen's free verse and Beckett's “free prose.” She concludes with a look at the contemporary poetry of John Cage, Edward Dorn, and the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school.

Perloff's work is a fusion of formalism with literary history. She attempts to build an historical argument about the development of...