For forty years Marjorie Perloff has played a pivotal supporting role in a major literary story of our time: the academic embrace of vanguardist poetry. The main characters in this story are of course the poets themselves, but Perloff (1981: 44), one of the first academic critics to treat this work “on its own terms,” as she put it in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, has provided poets of what John Ashbery called “The Other Tradition” with a literary-historical legitimacy that neither the New Critics nor the culture of the Writing Workshop was prepared to give. Along the way, she has been an effective, if partial, deprovincializer of academic literary culture, insisting on the connection of American poetry to the European avant-garde, and has trained many students to continue this cosmopolitan engagement in their own projects.
Now Perloff has written a book, Infrathin, that purports to look...
