SOURCE: A review of Wittgenstein's Ladder, in American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 2, June, 1997, pp. 435–36.

In the review below, Munk gives a positive assessment of Wittgenstein's Ladder.

In Jacob's dream, the landscape shapes itself into a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. In the Elegies, Rilke's lovers, like acrobats, have ladders “just propped by each other” (nur aneinander/lehnenden Leitern). Wittgenstein's ladder “is as equivocal as its destination,” writes Marjorie Perloff, who cites the Tractatus: “‘My propositions are elucidory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)’” (xiv). Perloff is struck by the “dailyness” of Wittgenstein's ladder: it is not Dante's purgatorial staircase, nor is it Yeats's “ancient winding stair”; it is a “mere ladder.”

The “subject” of Perloff's...