Supernatural Love (Historical Context)

Historical Context

The New Formalism

In the 1960s and 1970s, most poets in America wrote in free verse, which paid no attention to rhyme or meter or traditional poetic form. The predominant form was the personal lyric. During the 1980s, this started to change, and a movement emerged known as the New Formalism, in which poets returned to writing verse in traditional forms. The trend is noted by the poet and critic Dana Gioia in his 1987 essay "Notes on the New Formalism." He points out that two of the most impressive first poetry volumes of the decade are Brad Leithauser's Hundreds of Fireflies (1983) and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986), both of which were written entirely in formal verse. He might well have added Schnackenberg's Portraits and Elegies (1982) and The Lamplit Answer (1985), since she, too, was a poet working exclusively with traditional poetic forms. Gioia's own first collection of poetry, Daily Horoscope (1986), is also a contribution to the new movement.

Gioia notes that the new development is quite radical because, in 1980, most young poets had been trained so exclusively on free verse that they were unable to write poems in traditional meters. The literary culture in which they were raised emphasized the visual (sight) rather than the aural (sound), and poems were seen as words on a page rather than something to be read out loud. "Literary journalism has long declared it [traditional form] defunct, and most current anthologies present no work in traditional forms by Americans written after 1960," writes Gioia. He argues that the New Formalism, which was a revival not only of rhyme and meter but also of narrative poetry (that is, poetry that tells a story) came about as a reaction to the fact that poetry had lost its broad popular audience. It had become overly intellectualized, and poets were mostly confined to the academy, where they wrote poems that were read only by a small coterie of other poets, graduate students in creative writing, editors of poetry magazines and small presses, and grant-giving organizations. New Formalists, on the other hand, saw themselves as populists, which means in this context that they wrote for people who were not necessarily highly educated. Many of the New Formalists also worked outside the university setting. Gioia, for example, made his living as a businessman. Other poets associated with New Formalism in the 1980s included Marilyn Hacker, William Logan, Timothy Steele, Robert McDowell, Mark Jarman, and Mary Jo Salter.

The New Formalism was greeted with some hostility by poets and critics who preferred free verse to traditional forms. The term New Formalism itself was coined by hostile critics, who believed that traditional poetic forms were artificial and elitist and stifled free expression. In his essay "What's New about the New Formalism," Robert McPhillips describes the attack on the new movement by critics who "labeled these new formal poems as the products of 'yuppie' poets for whom a poem is mere artifice, something to be valued as a material object; or, more perniciously, as the product of a neo-conservative Zeitgeist." (Zeitgeist is a German word that can be translated as "spirit of the times.") The argument is that there was nothing new about New Formalism, that it was merely a throwback to what was regarded as the dry, academic poetry of the 1950s, against which free verse was a welcome revolution. McPhillips argues that this is untrue. He believes that the New Formalists' "attention to form has allowed a significant number of younger poets to think and communicate clearly about their sense of what is of most human value — love, beauty, mortality."

Sometimes the New Formalism has been referred to as the Expansive Movement, meaning that poetry was being expanded in terms of the number of forms that were considered acceptable. This term included the attempt to revive narrative and dramatic verse, in what was sometimes called the New Narrative.

Compare & Contrast

• 1980s: The emergence of New Formalism in American poetry challenges the dominance of free verse.
  Today: The coexistence of free verse and formalism in contemporary poetry creates a highly diverse literary culture.
• 1980s: The poetry slam is invented in a jazz club in Chicago in 1986. It treats poetry as a competition, with cash prizes for the winner. Poetry slams spread to other major cities in the United States and attract large audiences, showing that poetry can still be popular.
  Today: Poetry slams continue to flourish nationwide. The National Slam attracts teams from all over the United States, Canada, and other countries. Academic credentials are unimportant for success in poetry slams. Performers must be able to project their poetry to an audience, and showmanship counts as much as poetic skill. The vocal delivery of successful poetry slam performers is similar to hip-hop music.
• 1980s: In a decade of political and cultural conservatism, momentum builds for large budget cuts in federal subsidies for the arts, including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This is, in part, because several controversial artists supported by NEA grants produce work that offends mainstream religious sensibilities.
  Today: After the 1990s, in which some Republican congressmen called for the abolition of the NEA and the NEA budget was cut by 40 percent, the NEA and NEH receive relatively favorable treatment from the administration of George W. Bush. At a time of budget cuts, both endowments remain stable in the allocation of federal funds. In 2005, for financial year 2006, Congress approves an increase of $4.4 million for the NEA.