SOURCE: "Toward a Wittgensteinian Poetics," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 191-213.

Perloff is an Austrian-born American critic and educator. In the following essay, she applies Wittgensteinian poetics to the works of several contemporary writers and poets.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

The limit of language is shown by its being impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Wittgenstein's scattered notebook entries on cultural, aesthetic, and humanistic topics, collected by G. H. von Wright in a volume called Vermischte Bemerkungen (1977), appeared in English translation under the title Culture and Value in 1980. The date of publication may be taken as emblematic of the role a Wittgensteinian poetics was to play in the decade when the cult of personality that had dominated American poetry from the...