[In the following review, Kronick gives a negative assessment of The Dance of the Intellect.]

Perloff [in The Dance of the Intellect] contends that Post-Modernism is distinguished by the abandonment of genre, particularly that of lyric, in favor of the “art of writing,” which for her is embodied in the fragmentary and heterogeneous character of the Cantos. Her book begins with a group of essays dealing with the relation of Pound's poetics to Joyce's and Stevens'. She then turns to the metric techniques of Williams' and Oppen's free verse and Beckett's “free prose.” She concludes with a look at the contemporary poetry of John Cage, Edward Dorn, and the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school.

Perloff's work is a fusion of formalism with literary history. She attempts to build an historical argument about the development of twentieth-century poetics by analyzing works by a relatively limited selection of writers. But her argument is tautological because she only admits a writer into her history if he/she fits her formalist criteria. And though she is concerned with the American avant-garde, her history is quite conventional. In fact, her historical perspective is hardly more sophisticated than that found in textbooks and anthologies. The passage from Romanticism to Post-Modernism is from an emphasis on myth, the imagination, and self-expression to facts, writing, and the “‘dispersal of the speaking subject.’”

The problems emerge in her first chapter, “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” She misrepresents Stevens as a backward-looking Romantic who was too interested in the what of poetry, and she praises Pound as the true modernist because he was concerned with the how. Perloff's distinction between the how and the what reveals her commitment to the new critics' distinction between form and content. She fails to consider what has been widely recognized for at least twenty years by critical theorists—that is, any analysis of prosody or form in general already involves the writer in acts of selection and interpretation.

This formalist distinction between style and content governs the rest of the book. In an analysis of Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska, randomness, ellipses, and heterogeneity are said to break down the division between art and life. She retains new criticism's faith in organic form, although here it has been updated to become what we may call existential form: chaotic texts ultimately represent the chaos of modern life. She writes of Zukofsky's A that its “‘truths’ must be discovered phenomenologically: they remain poised as possibilities revealing the difficulties of human choice” (p. 186). Perloff's weak grasp of theory is demonstrated by the way mimesis is smuggled back into an argument that began by rejecting the notion of imitation. The limitations of formalism are most evident in the inability to account for the role of ideology and history in literature. Perloff's claim that Pound's hybrid texts are the models for Edmond Jabés's Le Livre des questions reveals an insensitivity not only to the profound differences between Pound's and Jabés's poetics (Stevens' concept of writing, however, has close affinities with Jabés's), but to the fate of Jewish culture since the holocaust. Apparently, Perloff believes style can erase history.