The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage

Abstract

This study, first published in 1981, argues that the map of modernist poetry needs to be redrawn so as to include a central tradition that cannot properly be located within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition that dominated the early-20th century. Marjorie Perloff traces this tradition from its early French connection in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern landscapes without depth as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.