Poetry Scholar, Longtime Palisadian Marjorie Perloff Dies

By LILY TINOCO | Assistant Editor

Longtime Palisadian and world-renowned poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff died on March 24 in her home in Pacific Palisades, her family shared with the Palisadian-Post.

“My grandmother seemed to have the life-force of 10 people in one,” her grandson, Benjamin Lempert, wrote in remembrance. “In conversation, she overflowed with exuberance, ideas, stories, opinions. It could be hard to get a word in, even when she was in her 90s. She related to the things she was thinking about with intuition and joy.”

Born Gabriele Schüller Mintz in Vienna, Austria, she fled when she was 6 years old—two days after Nazi Germany annexed Austria—on March 15, 1938. Marjorie and her family were exiled briefly in Switzerland, before moving to Riverdale in the Bronx and settling there. When she was 14, she changed her name to Marjorie.

Marjorie went on to attend Oberlin and Barnard colleges, and met Joseph Perloff in 1953—who she would later marry and have two children with, Nancy and Carey Perloff.

“As children, my sister Carey and I remember frequent, very festive dinner parties with elegant food and beautiful people,” Nancy said to the Post. “My mother received her Ph.D. in English from the Catholic University in 1965 and embarked upon a life-long career in teaching and scholarship.

“In her later years, she was an incredible mentor for me as I curated exhibitions on fields related to her line of research. She was a true critic, always honest in her appraisals of my work.”

Marjorie became a professor at Catholic University, where she taught from 1966 to 1971. Later, she taught at the University of Maryland and University of Southern California, and joined the Stanford faculty as a professor of English and comparative literature in 1986.

“No one who spent an hour in Marjorie’s company could ever forget her,” Robert Pogue Harrison, professor of French and Italian at Stanford, said in a statement. “In addition to being the best scholar of modern poetry of her generation, she was multilingual, immensely articulate, and a tour de force of wit and storytelling. She gave greatly more to Stanford than she took from it.”

Marjorie became widely recognized as a world-renowned scholar of poetry. She avidly attended concerts, lectures, symposia at the Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House in the Palisades.

“She was moreover a great fan of Los Angeles—enjoying going to Disney Hall for the symphony—and was a proud proponent of the city to any and all critics,” Nancy said. “She was also the one who discovered their house on Amalfi, despite an initial concern on my father’s part that it was too far from his Adult Center for Congenital Heart Disease at UCLA.”

Nancy said her mother loved the Palisades, and all it has to offer.

“She loved the natural beauty, especially a view of the ocean through Will Rogers [State Historic] Park, which she could see from her balcony,” she said. “During the pandemic, she carefully observed a lone palm tree visible from her porch. She became so enamored and found it so comforting that she wrote about it in a short column for the Times Literary Supplement.

“Such a multi-talented person is sorely missed by her family and her network of several hundred friends,” Nancy said to the Post. “But her life will live on in her 16 books, hundreds of articles, and a passion for topics, ranging from Frank O’Hara to the TV series ‘Le Bureau.’”