I have an irrational lust to set down everything I know. Holmes 1 Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. What one notices first about the so-called New Formalists is their distrust of form. Their work compulsively seeks to avoid or repress it, inserting pattern to pre-empt form's possibility.
Form is social.
It gives meaning to context through its display of the author's stance. Wordsworth's use of ordinary speech as a model for verse had, in its time, different implications from the same template in the hands of either Charles Olson or Phil Levine. In this sense, form is both neutral and amoral. There is no inherent virtue in a prose poem. The situational specificity of form also explains why followers, imitators, epigones can never hope to extend or even replicate the meaning of their heroes.