[In the following review of The Dance of the Intellect, Corcoran finds shortcomings in Perloff's thesis and tendency toward polemic.]

The title of this book [The Dance of the Intellect] is liable to suggest a coherence which its form in fact belies. A collection of previously-published essays on a range of writers from Pound himself to Williams, Oppen, Beckett, John Cage, and the recent American ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ poets, it never clearly argues for the kinds of continuity or interrelationship one might expect in a study claiming to consider a ‘tradition’. What Marjorie Perloff means by ‘poetry of the Pound tradition’ is poetry (not necessarily indebted to Pound, or even in any way acknowledging him) which runs counter to the assumptions of the Romantic-Symboliste-Modernist personal lyric which the book's opening essay identifies with Wallace Stevens. In its free-verse form this lyric ‘has become as conventionalized and trivialized as the Elizabethan love sonnet was by the end of the sixteenth century’. Poetry of the Pound tradition can, on the contrary, ‘accommodate verse and prose, narrative and lyric, fiction and nonfiction, the verbal and the visual’; it can use ‘real’, ‘documentary’, or ‘impure’ material rejected by the lyric; it is inventively ‘open’ to ‘the world’; it ‘thickens the plot’. In all these ways Pound is to be regarded as pivotal or exemplary: both in the Cantos and in the exactly comparable discourse of his letters he writes in ‘a mode that provides us with a paradigm of what writing can be (and has more or less turned out to be) in a time when established boundaries are undergoing erasure.’

This is not, perhaps, a particularly original thesis, but it does give Professor Perloff the opportunity for individual critical studies of poets she admires. At its best her criticism is wide ranging, deeply informed, enthusiastic, and illuminating. The work she discusses, however opaque, complex, and unfamiliar, always yields to her patient, busy analyses. On the opposition between Pound and Stevens, which is read as that between critical orientations represented by the names ‘Kenner’ and ‘Bloom’, she is penetrating and magisterially synoptic. She writes excellently about Williams, arguing persuasively that his celebrated and obfuscated ‘prosody’ in fact derives from his interest in the ‘look’ of a poem on its printed page; and she makes this perception a tool of judgment, favouring the earlier quatrains over the later triads, and showing how, in ‘The Young Housewife’, ‘typography … is destiny’. There are also original essays on lesser-known texts considered symptomatic: Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska and the correspondence between Pound and Joyce.

On some of her other enthusiasms, however (David Antin's performance poetry, Charles Bernstein's ‘Language’ poetry), I find Professor Perloff much less than persuasive. In these cases and, indeed, elsewhere in the book, her argument suffers from an unwillingness to articulate or address some obvious objections to the ‘tradition’. She simply asserts, for instance, that Pound's incorporations of documentary material in the Cantos are managed without the work's ‘ceasing to be poetry’, but we are not shown how. Are we to understand that this material is ‘absorbed into the fabric of the poem’ merely by being printed as part of it? More worryingly, its potential moral and political import is elided. As Peter Makin has recently shown in an otherwise sympathetic study, the documentary is the element of the Cantos which most frequently implicates them in a fascist politics. Similarly, it should not be permissible to admire, as Professor Perloff does, Zukofsky's use of private letters in A without citing the adverse criticism Williams has received for comparable appropriations in Paterson.

Reservations of this kind are bound to make the unconvinced reader less impressed by the book's general thesis. Such a reader may wish to insist that among contemporary American poets not discussed here (Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and Frank Bidart, in their different ways) the personal lyric appears to persist and thrive even while sophisticatedly recognizing and responding to some of Pound's perceptions and invitations. The non-American reader may also wonder where the book's strictures leave the majority of British and Irish poets writing today. I would argue that Seamus Heaney has shown in North how the lyric can accommodate and be extended by the ‘documentary’; and that Paul Muldoon has shown brilliantly in ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ how the lyric can accommodate and be extended by ‘narrative’ (and for ‘lyric’ read ‘sonnet’). Marjorie Perloff has written an always interesting and lively book weakened by its insistence on turning partiality, and a partial view, into polemic. Perhaps what we have after Modernism is a great musée imaginaire of formal possibilities, one of which (and a central one, in my view) this study, for all its openness, excludes.