21st–century Modernism: The "New" Poetics: Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos

In detailed readings of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Velimir Khlebnikov, Perloff studies the strains which were to become so important today: the Eliotic understanding that form is meaning, Stein's revisionary treatment of syntax and everyday language, Duchamp's conceptualism, with its transformation of the ontology of the "work of art" itself, and Khlebnikov's poetics of etymology, sound play, and spatial design. These individual but related poetic concerns are then examined in the work of a number of poets writing today.

"To imagine a language," said Wittgenstein, "is to imagine a form of life."

This revisionist narrative studies such key poetic "imaginings" both at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the millennium, so as to discover how their respective "forms of life" both converge and cross.