Marjorie Perloff is one of the few critics who is essential to the critical field of contemporary American poetry. Her 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics is a new powerful work on the features and development of American poetry in the new century. Persisting in her constant cautious, exquisite and profound research style, Perloff makes a deep and meticulous study on modernism, postmodernism, and the directions and methods of contemporary poetry. She approves of the experimental and inventive consciousness of language poetry and points out the continuity, connection and wholeness in the poetic development at the turn of the 20th century with Eliot, Stein, Duchamp and Khlebnikov as the major figures. Perloff's timely and persuasive intervention in the criticism of twentieth-century poetry reaffirms her vital role as the foremost interpreter of language poetry and constitutes an outstanding sample of contemporary poetry study as well.
