New Formalism

New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.

The term 'New Formalism' was first used in the article 'The Yuppie Poet' in the May 1985 issue of the AWP Newsletter, which was an attack on what was perceived as a movement returning to traditional poetic forms; the article accused the movement's poets not only of political conservatism but also yuppie materialism. New Formalism was a reaction against various perceived deficiencies in the practice of contemporary poets. In his 1987 piece "Notes on the New Formalism," Dana Gioia wrote: "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." For women formalists, the situation was complicated by gender; as Annie Finch wrote in 1994 in the Introduction to "A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women", "Readers who have been following the discussion of the "New Formalism" over the last decade may not expect to find such a diversity of writers and themes in a book of formal poems; the poems collected here contradict the popular assumption that formal poetics correspond to reactionary politics and elitist aesthetics ... The passion for form unites these many and diverse poets."

Despite the formal innovations of Modernism as exemplified in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the widespread appearance of free verse in the early decades of the 20th century, many poets chose to continue working predominantly in traditional forms, such as Robert Frost as well as those poets in America sometimes associated with the New Criticism, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. During the 1960s, with a surge of interest in Confessional poetry, publication of formal poetry became increasingly unfashionable. The emergence of the Language poets in the 1970s was one reaction to the predominance of the informal confessional lyric. But language poetry was another step away from the traditions of metre and rhyme, and was seen by some as widening the divide between poetry and its public.

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