SOURCE: A review of The Futurist Moment, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 87, No. 1, January, 1988, pp. 153–55.

In the following review, Materer gives a positive evaluation of The Futurist Moment.

Marjorie Perloff's new book, The Futurist Moment, which follows The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) and The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Pound Tradition (1985), confirms her position as one of the few critics who is essential to our understanding of contemporary poetry. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, her distinction of two traditions in modern poetry made possible a wider and more sympathetic reading of both modern and contemporary works than other critics have given us, which is clear from the book's treatment of writers such as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, David Antin, and John Cage. The Futurist Moment is not only a brilliant work of criticism but also a formidable piece of...