[In the following review, Altieri praises Poetic License, but takes issue with Perloff's historical perspective and attitude toward subjective expression.]

Marjorie Perloff's Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric offers superb literary criticism—clear, lively, learned, passionate, vigorously opinionated, and stunningly discriminating on what is worth being opinionated about. Perloff's keen observation that Allen Ginsberg's poems have “an extraordinary sense of the moment, of being, so to speak, at the center of the vortex” (215) is for me the perfect emblem for her own criticism.

Perloff's learning is doubly impressive. A true comparatist, Perloff is so broad in her knowledge of poetry and modern cultural history that she demands our viewing our own literature for its place within larger international concerns and movements. Yet she wields her learning deftly and gracefully, without ever showing off or overcomplicating materials or lamenting the death of civilization evidenced in others' lack of that learning. This learning proves most effective in the range of examples she invokes—using Roland Barthes on “corrected banality” to illuminate John Ashbery's ability to “allow experience to happen rather than to make sense” (280), citing romantic and New Critical avatars to demonstrate what is dated about certain contemporary writers (while making clear how much better an R. P. Blackmur would have handled the same issues), and always having at hand a compelling contrast among poets, perhaps most tellingly in her treating Robert Lowell as a foil to indicate the power and originality of Susan Howe's concrete engagement with Mary Rowlandson's life in the wilderness. Yet Perloff is not trapped within her own repertoire of examples. Almost alone among influential critics of poetry, she is willing to do hard scholarly work, which then she makes richly resonant, as in her intriguing analysis of how recent French anthologies make selections from American poets, or in her gripping examination of Sylvia Plath's manuscripts for Ariel, where we see clearly how Ted Hughes altered her plans in order to cast her as suicidal and thus to defend himself from being the cause of her undoing.

Perloff can bear her learning so lightly because her criticism is not simply a mode of performing her own abilities. She has serious ends, seeking both to demonstrate the importance of careful reading and to use such readings to intervene in the formation of our culture's commitments to particular modes of writing. Her criticism is driven by a teacherly urgency that we get the point, that we see as concretely as possible the pleasures and the emotions made available by the poets she admires, especially by those avant-garde writers most of us tend to ignore or to honor for their opinions rather than for their art. For example, Perloff brings to life the textures and compressed feelings in an undervalued minimalist poet like Lorine Niedecker while showing how her “objectivism has a curiously caustic edge” (49). At the other pole her responsiveness to texts enables her to show concretely how much of what is interesting in Paul Blackburn stems from his membership in the second string of sixties poets, or how W. S. Merwin's dark anxieties seem somewhat too elegant and delicately resonant for their own ambitions, so that one must take very seriously their affinities with a New Yorker lyricism in flight from the very history that Merwin wants to summarize. More telling yet is the Perloff who teaches us how to read the best twentieth-century authors—from the shifts in Beckett's tone as he translates himself into English to the intricate workings of Pound's line, to the performative dimension that affords strange affinities between D.H. Lawrence and Ginsberg, to the passionate intricacies of Susan Howe and the workings of six different stylistic modes in Gertrude Stein. The readings of Stein, Plath, and Howe become for me also exemplars of the ethical role criticism can play because Perloff shows in each case how these women achieve identities by taking on for their own purposes the full powers of our experimental traditions (taking on as well the full arrogance of the men who used these traditions as their claims to hegemony).

Perloff is no slouch in taking on the same kind of conflict. Probably the most impressive feature of Poetic License is its ability to cut to the core of fundamental contradictions and easy self-congratulations within the prevailing ideologies, in a fashion that allows Perloff a lively and compelling presentation of her own case. Thus even when one disagrees with her, one finds her anticipating one's moves and forcing individual authors she has the uncanny ability to get beyond academic disputes to engage the fundamental principles informing established evaluations, for example by showing how Lawrence as a poet cannot be reduced to the romantic tradition, or how Merwin can, despite the inflated claims of his academic admirers, or by showing why other poets ought to be given much more central places in contemporary tastes than they now occupy. In other cases she manages either to recuperate significantly undervalued writers, like Steve McCaffery or Howe, or to provide significant frameworks for understanding Ashbery's relation to Barthes or the differences between French and American critical stances on Beckett. Then she is even more impressive in developing what is of general significance in these particular arguments. For Perloff the health of contemporary writing depends on our finding means to resist both the predilections of the theory establishment and the contrasting cult of sensibility that one finds dominant in what Charles Bernstein calls “official verse culture” (qtd. in Perloff 3), a task that requires the patience and the imaginative flexibility to hear what experimental writers are trying to accomplish.

It is a major accomplishment simply to anatomize the prevailing official verse culture as Perloff does, laying bare its underlying commitments to a fundamentally romantic lyricism, with its “‘I-as-sensitive-register,’ the ‘direct’ colloquial diction that nevertheless moves readily and inevitably in and out of metaphor, the enjambed free-verse line, the ‘flat’ description that yields immanent meaning, and, most important, the Romantic faith in the power of ordinary, everyday experience to yield ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’” (63). Yet Perloff goes considerably further, managing to show that, despite the obvious conflicts between this cult of sensibility and the academy's idealizations of sophisticated theory, these opposing positions agree in dismissing the avant-garde, and hence in refusing literature any significant encounter with distinctively contemporary features of our experience. Both the official theory culture and the official verse culture reduce poetry to its paraphrasable contents, which for theory can then be engaged as cultural materials or as philosophical speculation, but in either case only at the cost of subordinating the signifying activity to a signified about which we can speak as if the poems were simply statements about the world rather than events within it. Verse culture stresses quite different contents, since its emphasis lies in “delicate epiphany” and the contingencies of the individual lyrical ego. But to the degree that the cult of sensibility leads those within this world to read little but poetry, it will not fully engage the pressures on romantic values fundamental to our contemporary discourses and relations to technology.

I cannot spend any more time on her particular observations. But in order to show how Perloff develops her general argument I want to indicate the basic movement of the book's first two essays. The first takes on the theory establishment where it is most vulnerable, that is, where its promising new readings lead to considerably more reductive stances than one finds in the best of the old readings. As her basic example Perloff examines a collection of essays by well-known theorists claiming to develop new approaches to lyric poetry. Rather than argue directly with the theorizing, Perloff takes the shrewd stance of asking what actual understanding of literature seems to underlie the critical performances. Then, despite all the theorizing about undoing the canon, this collection turns out “as resolutely Anglophile as Cleanth Brooks' Well-Wrought Urn,” deviating only by including “the most predictable French poets” (where Blackmur addressed a much broader spectrum). And, despite its emphasis on feminist criticism, this book “does not have a single essay devoted to a woman poet” (23). More significant yet is an almost total omission of twentieth-century materials, with no attention at all to the challenges posed by contemporary literature. For while these theorists can make claims about history, they seem blind to specific historical shifts in the very concept of lyricism that organizes their work. They thus remain insensitive to specific contemporary pressures to locate lyricism in “language not structure,” so that lyric language may become not a refuge from the world but an immanent questioning of dominant social and poetic modes of discourse within it.

The second essay takes on Perloff's other basic antagonist by exposing what is most vulnerable in our official verse culture—its inability to find a language for gender which is responsive to the most ambitious modern and contemporary female poets. Take the question of remaking the canon. When one looks at the handling of avant-garde materials it seems clear that, in the twentieth century at least, the canon is shaped less by gender bias than by bias against certain poetic stances, especially those that derive from Pound and from Stein. Marianne Moore, she points out, was always accepted, and both Plath and Adrienne Rich were from their early years lionized by the male establishment, while Niedecker, Lyn Hejinian, and Howe share the obscurity (measured by looking at anthologies) that also plagues Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Correlatively the myth of inclusiveness now proposed as an alternative to canonicity turns out “to exclude that which is other,” and hence that which might make gender a more problematic concept because it would show (as Howe does) the degree to which our myths about the nature of sensibility shape also what we claim matters in our woman poets. As Perloff powerfully demonstrates, the prevailing theoretical ways of idealizing difference in fact tend to collapse otherness into sameness because their inattention to signifying practices produces an overall bland tolerance and reliance on first readings incapable of engaging any real challenge.

I wish I could be as sympathetic to Perloff's general program as I am to her critical claims and to most of her specific readings, if only because any limitations I claim about her work will so obviously depend on my own competing commitments. Yet to shy away from our differences would be even more problematic, so I will try to clarify two substantial reservations I have about the overall model for poetry that I see underlying this book. One reservation involves Perloff's use of the idea of history, the other the model of literary value which is necessary for her account of history to have any force.

Clearly Perloff's own commitment to historicism, and to the kind of scholarship on which actual historical claims can be supported, provides a crucial weapon against the abstractions she so effectively opposes. But in order to handle the questions about value that then arise I am afraid she must make claims about history do more work than they actually can. If one could demonstrate that certain beliefs are “historically determined” (17), one could accurately define the pastness of the past, while also showing why certain modes of writing are required for contemporary culture. But Perloff does not make much effort to develop that theoretical case—a shrewd judgment. Not only is the past far too complex for us to fix in any determinist retrospective schemes, but the very need to invoke that determinism in the interest of one's own commitments betrays a present far too divided and contentious to allow a determinist account anything but a tautological generalization that things are as they are. More important, no determinist historicism can hope to mediate change; it can only hope to bear witness to what it seems will happen whatever one does, since whatever one does is fated. So it seems to me the most we can say for any historical claim is that although there seem options at any given time, certain patterns seen retrospectively take on a sense of inevitability that tempts us to invoke determinism. But to move from what seems fixed about the past to what seems desirable in the future requires supplementing historical analysis by directly evaluative arguments assessing the functions different modes of writing perform and comparing possible forms of life entailed by those literary choices.

Consider Perloff's sense that it seems historically necessary now for poetry to engage the discourses and media of a technologized society (28–29). Where does the necessity reside—in history or in Perloff's sense of what she wants to happen within certain historical pressures? It would clearly be good if some poetry engaged that technological discourse, just as it would be very good if poetry explored alternatives to the romantic sensibility Perloff anatomizes. However, the value of the poetry will not reside in what poets engage but in how they do so by rendering certain qualities of consciousness. Moreover, our capacity to read and assess that engagement cannot be separated easily from our ability to locate within historical change certain resources and levels of expectation which are not reducible to period beliefs. Therefore it seems to me important first to recognize how complex and multileveled any historical situation is, then to recognize how our response to such situations involves complex levels of identifying with and differing from the past, a past constituted by similar levels of identifying and differing.

Let me try to be concrete. Just as we need a poetry that addresses technology and the suspicions of inwardness that it inculcates, we need a poetry that can convince us there are arenas of our lives that remain not entirely shaped by such technological frames. Thus Sharon Olds not only develops a domestic lyricism, she also seeks in the domestic a source of values capable of resisting everything that Perloff thinks poets must incorporate into their work. In my view that resistance is at least as important a contemporary stance as are the efforts to develop somewhat less domestic models of intimacy one finds in Robert Hass and the later Ashbery. In order to understand how such traditional work might still make claims upon us we must distinguish between two critical orientations—one based on exposing the rhetorical structure that traps contemporaries in weak versions of romantic lyricism, the other devoted to what the best romantic poems offer to contemporaries, if primarily as challenges. Perloff's critique of official verse then in fact deals only with dangers that arise for a style, so that she never considers the possibility that the best resistance to an enervated romanticism will come not by shifting from structure to the play of language in our writing but by recuperating for our culture the eloquence against neoclassical eloquence that the romantics brought to their reflections. Yet it seems to me clear that the more culture allows technology to shape its languages, the more it needs not experiments in undoing syntax but work like C. K. Williams's that demonstrates what syntax can do to give consciousness access to the contemporary world.

Perloff does offer functional accounts of the values informing her arguments. But she tends not to argue abstractly for those values because she hopes her sense of historical imperatives and her readings will carry the day. In my view, however, the readings cannot suffice, in part because they presuppose a theory that seems to me to require more careful statement, and in part because Perloff's keen sense of academic blindness and pretension leads her to be suspicious of all thematic readings and attempts to attribute specific existential values to literary constructions. Appalled by how often such readings prove blind to the play of language, she goes to the opposite extreme of imagining that attention to the play of language and related performative states will in itself afford a sufficient account of literary value. Here her historicism reinforces her orientation because she can align such attention to poststructural denials that language could be “a conduit that leads directly from the speaking subject to a meaning above and outside the signifier” (223). To stress such meaning is to lose the fundamental readerly passion, which she defines as “a rhetorical and verbal energy that won’t let its subject go, a determination to use every available resource—pun, metaphor, epigraph, pictogram, aphorism, and especially example—to keep the reader on the edge of his or her seat” (291).

But can this view of passion suffice as a model for reading lyric poetry? Can we be content with envisioning readers on the edges of their seats without asking what so positions them and what consequences there might be if they assume those positions? It seems to me that Perloff at her very best, for example in her treatment of subjectivity in Howe, shows that both poetry and criticism seek modes of passion that regard linguistic effects as instruments for self-construction and for testing possible real world scenarios. And if this is correct, it simply will not do to rely as Perloff does on the basic binaries between signifying activity and the signified content. Poets like Ashbery and C.K. Williams make it clear that the mode of signifying can itself become a dimension of extraliterary content, since it defines how certain emotions can be held or verbal attitudes projected beyond the poem. Moreover, it seems to me plausible that the more complex culture gets, and the more it tempts us to distrust the mediations of language, the more important it is to preserve the classical sense of lyrical simplicity, that is, of a passion sustained not by its intricacy but by its capacity to stand as a surrogate for publicly sharable emotions which we might all want to utter. Lyric passion then seems to me no different from those passions we stake ourselves on in life: we want a simplicity that sometimes we gain only by the most elaborate indirectness, yet it would be a severe loss if we confused the means with the end, the workings of mediation with the rewards of expressive activity within and against the histories that work to form us in their image.