Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024) was born in Vienna and fled with her family to the United States during the Anschluss. She grew up in New Orleans and later attended Oberlin College and Columbia University, earning her doctorate at the Catholic University of America. After teaching at several universities, she settled at Stanford University as Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities.

Perloff established herself as the preeminent critic of modernist and postmodernist poetry. Her landmark study *The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage* (1981) reshaped how scholars understand experimental poetic lineage, followed by *Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media* (1991), *Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary* (1996), and *Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy* (2004). Her criticism consistently foregrounds how materiality, sound, and visual form challenge inherited notions of lyric meaning.

Perloff was hailed as one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation, receiving an NEH Fellowship and serving as President of the Modern Language Association. Her energetic defense of Language poetry and avant-garde practice provoked controversy among more conservative critics, but her command of both canonical and marginal traditions earned her a wide readership across academic and literary circles.

Perloff's rigorous formalism and insistence on the primacy of poetics as a mode of inquiry continue to define the study of twentieth-century poetry. She mentored a generation of scholars and extended her reach through a well-trafficked blog, ensuring that her provocations remain a living force in discussions of experimental writing.