Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States. Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita at Stanford University, where she taught courses and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets--Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara. She then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment:Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all). Wittgenstein's Ladder brought philosophy into the picture and her cultural memoir, The Vienna Paradox (2004), has been widely discussed. Her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2005 as well as Honorable Mention for the Robert Motherwell Prize of the Dedalus Foundation. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Perloff was the 2006 President of the Modern Language Association.