A Conservative Journey Through Literary America – Part 4: The New Formalism

by Matt Patterson

In the beginning there was the word, and it had form.

Homer wrote his two great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in dactylic hexameter.  Not for arbitrary reasons was it so organized – in pre-literate Greek society, epic poetry was sung, and the fixed metrical structure allowed for ease of memorization for the poet while simultaneously lending a pleasing musicality for the listener.  This relationship between music and words, a relationship both practical and aesthetic, continued to be enshrined in poetic structural forms for millennia.

Until Whitman.

That beautiful, bearded, destructive bastard knocked poetic form hard to the ground with his free, expansive, structureless verse.  The fact that it was also thrilling and brilliant and original had the unfortunate effect of encouraging lesser poets to write in a likewise fashion, and what Whitman had floored in the 19th century was thoroughly killed in the 20th.  Music and verse became decoupled; form and structure became increasingly ridiculed as backwards, stifling, archaic, not unlike bourgeoisie society itself.

Until…

In the 1980’s, a push-back began.  Poets began to re-examine the worth of the old structures; some began to come to their defense.  Some brave versifiers even began to revive them.  In 1987, a poet named Dana Gioia sounded the battle cry in Notes on the New Formalism;

…the real issues presented by American poetry in the Eighties will become clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem. The revival of traditional forms will be seen then as only one response to this troubling situation.

The debate had begun, and was thenceforth waged in creative writing departments and in the pages of literary journals across North America.  In 1990 William Baer started The Formalist, a journal whose prime business was “keeping [poetic] tradition alive” (April Linder, 2000).  In 1995 Dana Gioia and Michael Piech founded an annual conference for writers and enthusiasts of formal poetry at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.  In 1996 the summa of formal poetry anthologies, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, appeared.  In 2002 Dana Gioia was nominated by President Bush to assume the chairmanship of the National Endowment of the Arts, from which post he has vigorously promoted formal verse and its past and present practitioners.

(Gioia, one of the most active and high profile NEA chiefs in history, was nominated for a second four year term in 2006 – sadly, he stepped down in January 2009.)

So, what to make of this strange movement?  Is it a mere coincidence that its first stirrings occurred in the midst of Reagan’s Great Conservative Awakening?  Of course, literary conservatism does not in itself suggest political conservatism.  Or does it?

Some critics of New Formalism (or Neo-Formalism) see the movement not merely as a revival of harmless, if archaic, artistic structures.  These critics see a dark sociopolitical plot in the musings of the formal poets.  It is especially the claim of some Neo-Formalists that structured verse is more popular with the general reading public that arouses the ire of these (mostly academic) critics.  Ira Sadoff, for example, in an article titled “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia,” writes of this menacing aesthetic:

….neo-formalists have a social as well as a linguistic agenda.  When they link pseudo-populism (the “general reader”) to regular meter, they disguise their nostalgia for moral and linguistic certainty, for a universal….and univocal way of conserving culture.

Sadoff acknowledges, correctly, I think, that the enemies of Neo-Formalism are “democratic relativism and subjectivity.”  In identifying formal poetry with objective reality, Sadoff finds in the practitioners of formal verse a deep philosophic conservatism of an Aristotelian bent.  “Reality exists, and I shall sing of it!” proclaims the formal poet.

From this philosophical follows a sociopolitical conservatism; a rejection of “democratic relativism” otherwise known as multiculturalism.  The Neo-Formalists therefore commit the thought crime of celebrating Western Civilization (as have I just now, by capitalizing ‘Western Civilization’).  According to Sadoff, “The Neo-formalists’ perhaps unconscious exaltation of the iamb veils their attempt to privilege prevailing white Anglo-Saxon rhythms and culture.”

But Sadoff is not just finding hints of sociopolitical conservatism in between the iambs of Neo-Formalist poetry; Sadoff gleefully points out that Robert Richman, the editor of the Neo-Formalist anthology The Direction of Poetry, “…writes for the politically and socially conservative New Criterion.” From this and other pieces of damning evidence, Sadoff proceeds to chastise Richman and the Neo-Formalists;

Although it may cause discomfort to neo-conservatives, we live in a world of many cultures, many voices; our poetries are enriched by otherness…

Thus, in one fell swoop, Sadoff equates Richman and Gioia with Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol.

Whatever the fairness or lack thereof of Sadoff’s critique of Neo-Formalism, I think it is fair to say that the New Formalism is a conservative movement artistically, with some practitioners being more or less conservative politically.

(These terms are, of course, highly elastic over time.  As Paul Cantor, Professor of English at University of Virginia and pop culture guru, explained to me, conservative authors today want to “conserve” what has come in the past, but this in itself is actually quite a radical notion in today’s literary climate.  The example of Walt Whitman serves to illustrate how elastic these terms can be – Whitman was a pro-war, and, as Cantor reminded me, pro free-market.  Today, this would make him conservative, but in his day, it must be pointed out, and in fact my friend Martin did point out, those were fairly radical positions.  Indeed, the Republican Party itself, which Whitman supported, was the “radical” party in that it sought to overthrow the old “conservative” slave-holding society.)

Sadly for Sadoff, the New Formalists have been successful in exactly the manner in which he most feared – they enjoy a wide popular audience.  As Dana Gioia writes in “The Poet in an Age of Prose,” anthologized in After New Formalism:  Poets On Form, Narrative, and Tradition; “…New Formalist poetry and criticism have democratized literary discourse.  The poetry is accessible to nonspecialist readers.” For Sadoff and every academic who imagines themselves to be the keeper of the poetic gates, it is truly a revolting development to think that there may be non MFA students reading and, God forbid, enjoying poetry.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters --Part one, two, and three.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.


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Posted May 24th 2009 at 6:53 am in Entertainment, Featured Story | 42 Comments