We are saddened to learn about the demise of Marjorie Perloff. The following is the last paragraph of the review of her book, Infrathin: A Study in Micropoetics, which was published in 2021 (PN Review 263): The novel Infrathin was finished by Perloff when she was an octogenarian, at a period of political unrest and plague, and she was 90 years old in September of 2021.
She compares her most recent book favorably to the bloviations of her near-contemporary, the late Harold Bloom, in his posthumous Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles (reviewed PNR 258), where the slivers of gold must be dredged from the depths of a vast slough of senescence.
Her book is characterized by its concision, clarity, and insight. However, this parallel should not be interpreted as implying that Perloff’s most recent work is appropriate for someone of her age; rather, it is a book that would be suitable for a critic of any age.
It possesses the characteristics that are characteristic of genuine criticism; it makes you want to read or reread the texts that it discusses and to apply the micropoetical method that it outlines to those texts as well as other texts, while at the same time not being bound by it. Perloff demonstrates the way by departing from strict methodological adherence when the insights require it.
Literary criticism, as she herself puts it, “will never be an exact science,” and ultimately, as T.S. Eliot famously noted, “there is no method except to be very intelligent.” Of course, Perloff comes from a highly intellectual background.
As a reviewer, she is a pearl of great worth who shines like a good deed in a world that is full of misdeeds. If her penchant for paronomasia allows for a pun on her surname, then she is a gem of high value.
