SOURCE: "'Homeward Ho!': Silicon Valley Pushkin," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 15, No. 6, November-December, 1986, pp. 37-46.

An Austrian-born American educator and critic, Perloff has written extensively on modern poetry. In the following excerpt from a review of The Golden Gate, she asserts that Seth's concern with rhyme weakens the novel's characterization, plot, and satirical force.

The big news is that rhyme is back. More specifically, that after almost a century of free-verse dominance the long narrative poem written in rhyming metered stanzas is back. "Compose," said Ezra Pound in 1912, "in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." And again, "Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose." Self-evident as these twin propositions seemed to the great American Modernists from Pound, Williams, and H.D. to Lowell and Bishop, Merwin and Kinnell, O'Hara and Ashbery, Creeley and...