Marjorie Perloff^[a] (bornGabriele Mintz; September 28, 1931 – March 24, 2024) was an Austrian-born American poetry scholar and critic, known for her study of avant-garde poetry.^[1]

Perloff was a professor atCatholic University, theUniversity of Maryland, College Park, theUniversity of Southern California andStanford University.^[2][3]

She wrote books aboutW. B. Yeats,Robert Lowell, andFrank O'Hara and promoted poetry that normally was not discussedin the United States, such as works byLouis Zukofsky,Kenneth Goldsmith, andBrazilian poetry. Perloff was widely considered the most influential critic ofexperimental poetry. She coined the term "unoriginal genius" to reflect the desire of some contemporary poets to create poetry by using other people's words and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.^[4][5]

Perloff was bornGabriele Schüller Mintz on September 28, 1931, into a secularized Jewish family inVienna.^[1] Theannexation of Austria byNazi Germany exacerbated Vienneseantisemitism, and so the family emigrated in 1938, when she was six-and-a-half, going first toZürich and then to the United States, settling in theRiverdale section ofthe Bronx, where she attended theEthical Culture Fieldston School.^[1] According toAdam Kirsch, "Perloff can be counted as perhaps the youngest of the great wave of European Jewish intellectual refugees who immeasurably enriched American culture."^[6] She changed her name to Marjorie when she was a teenager, as she felt it sounded "more American".^[1]

After attendingOberlin College from 1949 to 1952, she graduatedmagna cum laude andPhi Beta Kappa fromBarnard College in 1953; that year, she married Joseph K. Perloff, acardiologist focused oncongenital heart disease.^[7] She completed her graduate work at theCatholic University of America in Washington, D.C., earning anM.A. in 1956 and aPh.D. in 1965; her dissertation onW. B. Yeats was later published as a book entitledRhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats in 1970.^[8][9]

Perloff taught atCatholic University from 1966 to 1971. She then moved on to become Professor of English at theUniversity of Maryland, College Park (1971–1976) and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at theUniversity of Southern California (1976–1986) andStanford University (1986–1990). Her position was endowed as the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford (1990—2000; emerita from 2001). She was also Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at theUniversity of Southern California.^[2][3]

Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental andavant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents ofmodernist and, especially,postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts andliterary theory.^[10]

The first three books published by Perloff each focused on different poets: Yeats,Robert Lowell, andFrank O'Hara respectively. In 1981, she changed directions withThe Poetics of Indeterminacy, which began her work on avant-gardist poetry, paving the way forThe Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture in 1986 and many subsequent titles.Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, published in 2004, won theRobert Penn Warren Prize in 2005 as well as Honorable Mention for theRobert Motherwell Prize of theDedalus Foundation.^[11]

Perloff did much to promote poetics that are not normally part of the discoursein the United States such as works ofLouis Zukofsky,Kenneth Goldsmith, orBrazilian poetry. She was widely considered the most influential critic ofexperimental poetry. She was credited with coining the term — "unoriginal genius" — to reflect the interest of some contemporary poets in generating their work by citational and constraint-based practices rather than inspiration or other personal sources.^[4][5] Her work on contemporary American poetry, and, in particular, poetry associated withLanguage poetry and theObjectivist poets, posits and critiques an "Official Verse Culture" that determines what is and is not worthy of publication, critique and emulation.^[12] In 2001, she gave theBritish Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History, onGertrude Stein's Differential Syntax.^[13]

In 2008–09, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting professor of European Comparative Literature inSt Anne's College, Oxford.^[14] She was also member of the International Jury of theJanus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry Foundation [hu] (an award of theHungarian PEN Club).^[15]

Perloff and her husband, who died in 2014, had two daughters,Carey Perloff and Nancy Perloff.^[1]

Perloff died at her home inPacific Palisades, Los Angeles, on March 24, 2024, at the age of 92.^[1]

This list isincomplete; you can help byadding missing items.(February 2022)

• Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2016.ISBN 9780226054421.OL 27210583M.
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A New Translation (translated byDamion Searls, with a foreword by Marjorie Perloff) (Liveright, 2024)ISBN 978-1-324-09243-8
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig,Private Notebooks: 1914–1916 (translated by Marjorie Perloff) (Liveright, 2022)ISBN 978-1-324-09080-9
• Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays (University of Chicago Press, 2014)ISBN 978-0-226-19941-2 Readan excerpt.
• Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010)ISBN 978-0-226-66061-5. Spanish version:El genio no original: Poesía por otros medios en el nuevo siglo (greylock, 2019)ISBN 978-84-948280-4-1
• Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama Press, 2004)ISBN 978-0-8173-1421-7
• The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir (New Directions Books, 2004)ISBN 978-0-8112-1571-8
• TheFuturist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New Preface (University of Chicago Press, 2003) pbk.ISBN 978-0-226-65738-7
• Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Northwestern University Press, 1998)ISBN 978-0-8101-1560-6
• Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (University of Chicago Press, 1998)ISBN 978-0-226-66059-2 (originally published by Braziller, 1977)
• The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of thePound Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 1996) pbk.ISBN 978-0-8101-1380-0
• Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (University of Chicago Press, 1996) pbk.ISBN 978-0-226-66058-5
• Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (University of Chicago Press, 1991)ISBN 978-0-226-65733-2
• Poetic License: Studies in theModernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Northwestern University Press, 1990)ISBN 978-0-8101-0843-1

Radical artifice

• Golding, Alan (Spring 1994). "Avant-gardes and American poetry".Contemporary Literature.35 (1):156–170.doi:10.2307/1208740.JSTOR 1208740.

• Author Page at EPC
• A response to the literary criticHarold Bloom
• Audio of Marjorie Perloff's lecture"The Aura of Modernism" delivered at theWalter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities on May 19, 2004.
• Review ofThe Vienna Paradox poetRon Silliman discusses Perloff's memoir on his blog September 12, 2005
• Three one-hour radio interviews onEntitled Opinions withRobert P. Harrison about Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and the Avant-Gardes

• 1931 births
• 2024 deaths
• 20th-century American women writers
• 21st-century American women writers
• American academics of English literature
• American literary critics
• American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
• American women literary critics
• 20th-century Austrian Jews
• Austrian literary critics
• Austrian women literary critics
• Barnard College alumni
• Catholic University of America School of Arts and Sciences faculty
• Catholic University of America alumni
• Ethical Culture Fieldston School alumni
• Jewish emigrants from Austria after the Anschluss to the United States
• Emigrants from Austria after the Anschluss to the United States
• Oberlin College alumni
• People from Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles
• People from Riverdale, Bronx
• Presidents of the Modern Language Association
• Stanford University Department of English faculty
• University of Maryland, College Park faculty
• University of Southern California faculty
• Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 21st-century American Jews
• Cage scholars

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