New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.Robert McPhillips (2005), The New Formalism: A Critical Introduction: Expanded Edition, Textos Books. p. xi.
Background The formal innovations of Modernist poetry, inspired by Walt Whitman and popularized by Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters, and T.S. Eliot, led to the widespread publication of free verse during the early 20th century. By the 1920s, debates about the value of free verse versus formal poetry were filling the pages of American literary journals.R.S. Gwyn (1999), New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History, Story Line Press. pp. 72–85.
Meanwhile, many poets chose to continue working predominantly in traditional forms, such as Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht. Formal verse also continued being written by American poets associated with the New Criticism, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate.
During the 1950s, the second coming of "The Free Verse Revolution" was inspired by the writings of Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and of Imagist poet William Carlos Williams. The Second Free Verse Revolution also introduced into American poetry, according to Frederick Feirstein and Frederick Turner, the Silent Generation's much wider "revolt against the social conventions of Puritan America", which was reflected by the Greaser subculture of the era and the Rock and Roll music of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, and Elvis Presley.Edited by Frederick Feirstein (1989), Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism, Story Line Press. pp. viii–ix.
As a result, it became more expected for poets to experiment and, with the rise of Confessional poetry, the writing and publication of autobiographical and nonprosodic verse, often with a liberal political bent, became fashionable. As often happens in literature and the arts, however, what had begun as an anti-establishment counterculture seeking freedom from constraint hardened over time into a literary elite that opposed innovation and expressed hostility to both older and younger poets who refused to conform to its dictates.Edited by Frederick Feirstein (1989), Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism, Story Line Press. pp. viii–xv.
According to Feirstein and Turner,
"It is hard to imagine in 1989 how narrow and doctrinaire was the world of poetry in the seventies when the poets in the movement began to mature. Both narrative and meter were considered at best out of date and at worst the instruments of bourgeois capitalism. Ignoring the strict meter and narrative impulses of blues and country and western lyrics, the high priests of the ruling ideology proclaimed that narrative and meter were elitist European importations and that the true American voice could only be heard in free verse. These views went together with a pose of the poet as resenting and rebelling against the poets cultural past and that of society at large. Although he or she invariably taught in a university, the poseurs would express profound hostility to the intellectual imagination, especially in the forms of science and technology, and a sentimental preference for nature over culture. The poseurs often would be gleefully pessimistic about the future which would seem to justify their solipsistic confessions about their darkly perceived past."Edited by Frederick Feirstein (1989), Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism, Story Line Press. pp. vii–viii.
In an essay that he admitted was similarly intended to provoke, R.S. Gwynn wrote in similar terms about American poetry of the 1970s,
"The tribal music of Poetryland -- the murky manifestos of Projective Verse and breath-units, the proliferation of cut-rate knock-offs of Howl and Daddy, the shamanism of the Deep Image and the multiform brain -- had begun to resemble ritualized incantations, mumbled by the multitudes of but comprehended by few, and a sense emerged that certain types of poetry had overstayed their welcome."Theresa Malphrus Walford (2019), Transatlantic Connections: The Movement and New Formalism, Story Line Press. p. 39.
An early sign of a revival of interest in traditional poetic forms was the publication of Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics in 1968.The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics E. P. Dutton & Company, New York, 1968. A few years later Turco published a college textbook which presented poetry from the writer's perspective and emphasized the use of formal elements, this was Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston Publishing Co, 1973. In the early 1970s X. J. Kennedy started publishing the short-lived magazine Counter/Measures which was devoted to the use of traditional form in poetry. A few other editors around this time were sympathetic to formal poetry,Timothy Steele in an interview mentions both Don Stanford at The Southern Review and Tom Kirby-Smith at The Greensboro Review. He also mentions Robert L. Barth's press and his series of metrical chapbooks. but the mainstream continued to oppose rhyme and meter.
Meanwhile, aspiring Formalist poets from both the Silent and Baby Boomer Generations were still able to attend classes taught by older professors, including Yvor Winters, Robert Fitzgerald,William Baer (2006), Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms, Writer's Digest Books. p. 237. and Elizabeth Bishop, who continued to teach both literary criticism and the craft of writing poetry in a more traditional way.Dana Gioia (2021), Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer's Life, Paul Dry Books. pp. 32–58.
In a 2021 interview, Dana Gioia said that while New Formalism and New Narrative are the most controversial responses in American poetry to the Second Free Verse Revolution, they are only one facet of an enormous grassroots movement. Gioia elaborates,
"If I go back to 1975 when I was leaving Harvard, I was told by the world experts in poetry that rhyme and meter were dead, narrative was dead in poetry. Poetry would become ever more complex, which meant that it could only appeal to an elite audience, and finally, that the African American voice in poetry rejected these European things and would take this experimental form. What the intellectuals in the United States did was we took poetry away from common people. We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away, and the common people reinvented it. The greatest one of these was Kool Herc in the South Bronx, who invented what we now think of as rap and hip hop. Within about ten years, it went from non-existent to being the most widely purchased form of popular music. We saw in our own lifetime something akin to Homer, the reinvention of popular oral poetry. There were parallels in the revival of slam poetry, cowboy poetry, and new formalism, so at every little social group, people from the ground up reinvented poetry because the intellectuals had taken it away from them."
In what William Baer has seen as the beginning of New Formalism, Rachel Hadas published her first chapbook in 1975, Charles Martin published his first collection in 1978, and Timothy Steele's first book of poems appeared in 1979.
Frederick Feirstein and Frederick Turner, on the other hand, first became aware that New Formalism existed during a 1981 conversation with Dick Allen at the "Minetta Tavern" in Greenwich Village. Turner had just published the provocative essay "Mighty Poets in Their Misery Dead: A Polemic on the Contemporary Poetry Scene" in Missouri Review and had immediately heard from many fellow Formalist poets. Meanwhile, Feirstein was already corresponding with West Coast Formalist poets, including Charles Martin and Dana Gioia. Turner and Feirstein later recalled, "We began to see ourselves as a distinct movement of many people. We saw each other's work begin to appear consistently in the literary journals."Edited by Frederick Feirstein (1989), Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism, Story Line Press. pp. xiv–xv.
Other literary scholars, including Robert McPhillips and Gerry Cambridge, date the beginning of New Formalism from the publication of Diane Wakoski's 1986 polemic essay "The New Conservatism in American Poetry" and the irate defenses that same essay provoked from Robert Mezey, Lewis Turco, David Radavich, Brian Richards, and Dana Gioia.Jay Parini (2004), The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Volume 3, p. 252.McPhillips (2006), The New Formalism: A Critical Introduction, pp. 3–5.
Early history One of the first rumbles of the conflict that was to provide the impetus to create New Formalism as a specific movement, came with the publication in 1977 of an issue of the Mississippi Review called 'Freedom and Form: American Poets Respond'. The late 1970s saw the publication of a few collections by poets working in traditional forms, including Comforting the Wilderness (1977) by Robert B. Shaw, Room for Error (1978) by Charles Martin, and Timothy Steele's Uncertainties and Rest (1979). In 1980 Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell started the small magazine The Reaper to promote narrative and formal poetry. In 1981 Jane Greer launched Plains Poetry Journal, which published new work in traditional forms. In 1984 McDowell started Story Line Press which has since published some New Formalist poets. The Reaper ran for ten years. Frederick Feirstein's Expansive Poetry (1989) gathered various essays on the New Formalism and the related movement New Narrative, under the umbrella term 'Expansive Poetry'.
From 1983 the onset of "neoformalism" was noted in the annual poetry roundups in the yearbooks of The Dictionary of Literary Biography,'The Year in Poetry' was contributed by Lewis Turco from 1983 to 1986. and through the mid-1980s heated debates on the topic of formalism were carried on in several journals.for example, see Salmagundi 65 (1984) with Mary Kinzie's piece "The Rhapsodic Fallacy," (pp. 63 – 79) and various responses; Alan Shapiro's piece "The New Formalism," in Critical Inquiry 14.1 (1987) pp. 200 – 213; and David Wojahn's "'Yes, But ...': Some Thoughts on the New Formalism," in Crazyhorse 32 (1987) pp. 64 – 81. 1986 saw the publication of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse and the anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms.Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms edited by Philip Dacey and David Jauss
The Poetry Wars As the pioneers of the movement were joined in print by a growing number other young formalist poets, the dispute that had begun in the 1920s and 1950s reignited and would later be dubbed the Poetry Wars by literary critics and historians.Quincy R. Lehr, The New Formalism - A Postmortem , The Rain Town Review, Volume 9, Issue 1. This time, however, Free Verse poets, many of whom were English professors and veterans of the 1960s Counterculture, found themselves in the ironic position of being The Establishment.Brendan D. King, St. Austin Review, The Poet and the Counterrevolution: Richard Wilbur, the Free Verse Revolution, and the Revival of Rhymed Poetry, March/April 2020, American Literature in the Twentieth Century, pp. 15–19.