"The book commands respect, [...], not only for its energy and the precision of its readings, but for its refusal to surrender powers of arbitration from the artist to the teacher or theorist." Times Literary Supplement
"The heart of [Perloff's] book is her enthusiasm - a well-researched and carefully argued enthusiasm" The Virginia Quarterly Review
Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous books, including Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991), Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and Poetry On and Off the Page (1998). She is considered to be one of the most distinguished critics now writing on twentieth-century poetry and poetics.
Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
1 Avant-Garde Eliot.
2 Gertrude Steins Differential Syntx.
3 The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp.
4 Khlebnikovs Soundscapes: Letter, Number, and the Poetics of Zaum.
5 Modernism at the Millennium.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.