Two Cheers for the New Formalism

Ever since Alan Shapiro showed me, in 1979, how closely a free-verse draft of mine approximated pentameter, I’ve written poems mostly in meter of one kind or another. So if there’s some sort of referendum on “The New Formalism,” I have voted with my feet (iambic and otherwise), early and often. Reading Dana Gioia’s remark, in a “Symposium” for the special issue of Crosscurrents on “Expansionist Poetry” (January 1989), that his “generation of writers,” beginning work in the 1960s or ’70s, had grown up “in a stale literary environment, where poetic conventions have become so derivative and mannered that they prove unusable for serious new work” (88), I could only agree. My own critical study, The Psycho-Political Muse (1987), said something similar. Why then, after over a decade of vexation with the pseudoprofundities of those years, do I feel a nagging disappointment with much of the poetry associated with “New Formalism”?

In his introduction to the special issue of Crosscurrents, Dick Allen writes that New Formalist poems are typically “more passionate and involved than intellectualized and distanced” (9); Robert McPhillips finds in this greater immediacy the main difference between the old formalism and the new. He finds older formal poets such as John Hollander or even Anthony Hecht more literary, apt to drop French and Latin into their titles and epigraphs, overfond of European scenes and artifacts. “The diction of the New Formalist poem” is usually “colloquial rather than elevated”; if it engages with “cultural objects” (69), these “are likely to be from popular culture and to be indigenously American” (69). The New Formalists “accept their cultural tradition as firmly established,” and their poems are “rooted unselfconsciously in the middle class rather than a real or aspired to aristocracy” (70).