Poetry scholar and critic Marjorie Perloff has died

Marjorie Perloff, the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, a world-renowned scholar of contemporary poetry and champion of experimental poetry, died March 24 at her home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 92.

A leading literary critic and author of more than a dozen books, roughly 250 scholarly articles and book chapters, and hundreds of book reviews, Perloff was known for her ability to explain complex experimental and conceptual poetry in jargon-free books and articles read by general audiences and literary scholars alike. 

“Marjorie came to Stanford in 1986, at the peak of a distinguished career,” said Roland Greene, the Mark Pigott KBE Professor and the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities in H&S. “Before she retired in 2000, she published several of her most influential books, mentored a generation of doctoral students, served as president of both the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, and gave Stanford a lifeline to the world of avant-garde poetry past and present. This is a place with a strong tradition in poetry criticism, but Marjorie was easily the most important poetry critic ever at Stanford.” 

Making the complex clear

Perloff was singular as a literary critic and scholar for her mastery of making complex ideas and writing clear.

“What made her such a compelling force in modern letters was her passionately engaged intellect, excited by experimentation but grounded in the literatures of the several languages she knew,” wrote Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, Albert Gelpi and Professor of English, Emerita, Barbara Gelpi in a joint statement. “She addressed difficult texts with clarifying empathy and argued out the issues that they raised.”

Perloff published her first books in the 1970s, and they focused on the works of William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara. In the 1980s, Perloff’s books explored poetic themes within larger avant-garde movements. These works include The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Northwestern University Press, 1981) and The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press, 1986). Her byline also frequently graced the pages of The Washington Post, Boston Review,and The Times Literary Supplement.

She detailed her belief in the power of close reading and why it is critical for gaining a true understanding of literary and poetic works in her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama Press, 2004). This collection of essays explored topics in writing that spanned modernism and contemporary avant-garde. Differentials received the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2004.

Perloff also made her mark as a teacher and mentor. At Stanford, her undergraduate and graduate classes explored topics such as literary theory; introductory, modern, and contemporary poetry; comparative British and American poetry; digital poetics; and visual arts analysis.

Former Stanford student and friend Craig Dworkin, professor of English at the University of Utah, described her dedication to teaching saying, “one semester our classroom was across an atrium from the building entrance, so we could see Marjorie arrive, and before she reached the room she would already be talking; I realized that she was always teaching, but only sometimes were you lucky enough to be within earshot.”

Perloff made many contributions to the Stanford community, including serving as director of the undergraduate honors program in the Department of English (1991) and director of graduate studies from 1994 to 1997.

From Vienna to the U.S.

Perloff was born Sept. 28, 1931, in Vienna. At age 6, she fled Vienna with her family three days after Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938. In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox (New Directions Press, 2003), Perloff recounted her early life in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to the U.S. and childhood in New York with her Jewish family, and how the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz became the English-speaking American girl Marjorie in her teens.

She studied English at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, then Oberlin College, and Barnard College, where she graduated in 1953. She married Joseph Perloff, who became a renowned cardiologist and pioneered the study of congenital heart disease, in 1953. They had two children, Nancy and Carey.

After working as a movie subtitle writer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Perloff moved to Washington, D.C. with her family. There, she earned a Master of Arts (1956) and a doctorate (1965) in English literature at Catholic University of America. Her doctoral dissertation, “Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats,” was published as a book in 1970. Perloff became a full professor at Catholic University of America, where she taught from 1966 to 1971. Later, she taught at the University of Maryland (1971-1976) and the University of Southern California (1976-1986). In 1986, Perloff joined the Stanford faculty as a professor of English and comparative literature.

At Stanford, Perloff had a profound and lasting impact on her students and colleagues. Robert Pogue Harrison, the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Emeritus, team taught Introduction to the Humanities and two graduate seminars on the French 19th-century poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud with Perloff in the late 1990s.

“No one who spent an hour in Marjorie’s company could ever forget her,” said Harrison, professor of French and Italian. “In addition to being the best scholar of modern poetry of her generation, she was multi-lingual, immensely articulate, and a tour de force of wit and storytelling. She gave greatly more to Stanford than she took from it. Team teaching with her was an exhilarating experience that I will always cherish.”

She received numerous awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981) and National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship (1985). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and American Philosophical Society (2012). She also received honorary degrees from the Chinese Foreign University in Beijing, Bard College, Chapman University, and the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

“She was an inspired teacher and committed mentor to generations of students,” wrote Albert and Barbara Gelpi. “Marjorie lived that same passionate commitment: companion and wife of Joseph Perloff, beloved mother and grandmother, and devoted and loyal friend. She was a vibrant presence in the world, and she will be remembered by the many near and far who grieve her loss.

Perloff is preceded in death by her husband, Joseph, who died in 2014. She is survived by her daughters, Carey and Nancy, and her three grandchildren. A memorial service will take place in May.