THE DISTRIBUTION OF ARGUMENT: New Formalism Of/on the Contemporary (2012)

had to come back in literary criticism. The question was only how. Many no doubt thought a revived formalism would be reactionary, neo-conservative. After all, was not being formalist in Anglophone criticism associated with the Right, with what Grant Webster called the Tory Formalism of the Critics? This is somewhat unfair to the Critics, most of whom were Deal Democrats politically. But it was true that in the 1980s and 1990s, taking an aesthetic approach to literature often seemed to embody a hostility to academic theory and its advocacy of various political agendas: feminist, postcolonial, African Americanist, queer. The journalistic and personal criticism that dominated popular newspapers and magazines during the turn of the 21st century seemed to advocate a return to aesthetics, while being prevented both by the logistical limitations of journalistic articles and a reluctance to explore the whole issue thoroughly (which after all requires a lot of technicalities) from actually producing aesthetic readings. Often, people seemed to want to see a return to simpler, more obvious modes of reading, and did not care whether or not form as such was seriously examined.Meanwhile, the term New Formalism was being actively debated among practicing poets. Many twentieth- century poets had persisted in writing in rhyme and meter, even at the height of free verse. In the US alone, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur all wrote in forms at least some of the time. In a more dedicated way, figures such as X. J. Kennedy, J. V. Cunningham, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, and Alan Shapiro come to mind, most of them being associated, unco incidentally, with the ascetic regularity of the Stanford professor Yvor Winters. There is also of course the very different case of the superb James Merrill. These were exceptions to the rule that free verse reigned. By the end of the twentieth century, though, using accustomed forms had become more de rigueur, with a gaggle of younger poets doing so, including such socially radical figures as Marilyn Hacker. Nonetheless, there was a strong conservative strain in Formalism, as represented by Frederick Turner, one of the spearheads of expansive poetry (something always seen as going together with Formalism, although form presumably entails as much of an awareness of the minute as the immense). In the 1980s, even as Turner's call for inspirational, narrative poetry written in the rhythmic and metrical styles prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth century seemed to hearken to a nostalgic template any overt connection with political conservatism was denied. By the 2000s, though, it had become clear that Turner espoused an openly conservative agenda, extending even to a belief, rare even among strict-constructionist jurists, in natural law.If there had been an analogous of this sort in criticism it would have had to come from the popular press, as humanities academia is so dominantly oriented, if not necessarily to leftist views, at least to discourses of them. For reasons stated above, though, this did not happen, although critics such as James Wood, Stephen Burt, and Adam Kirsch came close, without ever avowing formalism as an articulated credo. Instead, a very different kind of came up in academia. This formalism was not what Marjorie Levinson - whose 2007 'What Is Formalism? article in PMLA launched as an academic term - called backlash formalism, formalism that simply sought to go back to the Critics. In truth, this would have been hard to do given the nature of academia in the 2000s. Not only were there at that point many writers in the canon that the previous formalists had not heard of, the literary period most scorned by the Critical consensus - the nineteenth century, seen as a seedbed of sentimentality and what T. E. Hulme called spilt religion - was at the center of serious literary study. …