New Formalism: Dangerous Nostalgia or Angelic Rebellion?

The essay aims to offer a survey of the movement known as New Formalism, asking why it arose (or, at least, was seen by some as arising) in the American poetry world in the late twentieth century. The hostility to traditional poetic forms can be considered a specifically American phenomenon, going back, perhaps, to the early supporters of Whitman. For some critics and poets metrical forms came to be associated with a European heritage that was to be shaken off. Free verse was thus taken to be the natural poetic means for a free country and during the middle decades of the century those poets who still wrote in form were to a certain extent marginalised. New Formalism was therefore a reaction to this tendency. The essay examines the anthologies of the 1980s and 1990s that first gave prominence to the movement and discusses some of the polemical essays that were written in the same years. In conclusion, the essay attempts a general assessment of the major achievements of poets associated with the New Formalism.