Professor Marjorie Perloff passed away on March 24, 2024. It is fair to say that Dr. Perloff is the most distinguished of our graduate alumni/ae.  The New York Times obituary of March 26 described her as "one of the world's leading scholars of contemporary poetry."  

Dr. Perloff received her M.A. and Ph.D. from our Department, the latter in 1965 with a dissertation on Yeats's rhymes, directed by Professor Craig LaDriere.  She then served on the faculty until 1971.  She subsequently taught at the University of Maryland and the University of Southern California, ending her teaching career in 2001 at Stanford, where she held a chair.  Among the many professional offices that she held were presidency of the MLA and (as Dr. Suarez's predecessor) President of ALSCW.

Having myself joined the faculty in 1963 and having shared an office with Marjorie while she taught at CU, I witnessed at first hand the early mark she made in the profession.  Her 1967 PMLA article on Yeats elicited an invitation to dialogue from Richard Ellmann, among the leading Yeats scholars at that time.  She was already at work on the critical study that made her and its subject's reputation, Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, published in1967.  It would be unwieldy to chronicle her subsequent lectures and publications, which embraced a staggering range of authors, national literatures, methodologies, and theoretical approaches.  Though she retired from teaching in 2001, her productivity continued at full speed to the end.

After leaving her graduate alma mater, Marjorie returned to CU several times for lectures and to revisit friends.  I've stayed in touch with her in recent years, and recall her saying several times how close she felt--after her association with other institutions--to this Department.  Its imprint is discernible in her work: strong emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of literature and careful attention to language as an artistic medium.    

That said, I think that a review of Professor Perloff's massive achievements as scholar, teacher, and critic leaves unsaid something of major significance about her life.  She was born in Vienna in 1931 and, being Jewish, fled with her family from Austria upon the Anschluss by Hitler in 1938.  When the World War I notebooks of Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself an Austrian of Jewish descent, called for translation into English, she was recruited to do the job.  The widely acclaimed product was published in 2022.  In recognition of her many achievements, the Austrian Government awarded her its Ehrenkreuz No 1 fur Kultur und Wissenschaft (Cross of Honor for Culture and Scholarship) along with Austrian citizenship and passport.  Literary scholars might call that poetic justice.

Joseph Sendry
Professor Emeritus, Department of English