SOURCE: A review of Wittgenstein's Ladder, in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, April, 1998, pp. 186–87.

In the following review, Middleton gives a favorable assessment of Wittgenstein's Ladder.

For the past twenty five years, one influential movement in American poetry has been practising a linguistic acsesis which has stripped poetry of voice, metre, poetic diction, and theme, completing an earlier avant-garde mission to clear away all vestiges of specialized literary languages. Its usual targets are described as “the formalized first-person mode we call lyric poetry” (and its claim to be what Marjorie Perloff calls “the expression or externalisation of inner feeling,”) and naive realism, but Language Writing has arguably another more elusive target too. Perloff's highly readable new book [Wittgenstein's Ladder] identifies a current in modern writing which runs from Gertrude Stein to poets as diverse as Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Lyn Hejinian, opposing the idea...