Formalistic Criticism in Poetry

Background

The formalist approach to poetry was the most influential in American criticism during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and it is still often practiced in literature courses in colleges and universities in the United States. Its popularity was not limited to American literary criticism.

In France, formalism has long been employed as a pedagogical exercise in reading literature in the universities and in the lycées. In England in the 1940s and 1950s, formalism was associated with an influential group of critics writing for a significant critical periodical, Scrutiny, the most prominent of whom was F. R. Leavis. There also was a notable formalist movement in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and, although championed by René Wellek in the United States, its influence at that time was primarily limited to Slavic countries.

The formalist approach in the United States was popularized by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, all four southerners, all graduates of Vanderbilt University, and all, in varying degrees, receptive to the indirections and complexities of the modernism of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and William Butler Yeats. The critical method of Ransom, Tate, Warren, and Brooks, which came to be known as New Criticism, was, in part, developed to explicate the modernism of Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats. A fifth critic, R. P. Blackmur, not directly associated with the Vanderbilt group, made important contributions to the formalist reading of poetry in The Double Agent (1935) and in essays in other books. He did not, however, develop a distinctive formalist method.

Formalism in the history of literary criticism

Formalism is clearly a twentieth-century critical phenomenon in its emphasis on close readings of literary texts, dissociated from extrinsic references to authors or to their society. There had been a formalist tendency before in the history of literary criticism, but it did not, as in twentieth-century formalism, approach exclusivity in its emphasis on the structure of the work itself. Aristotle’s analysis in De poetica (c. 334-323 BCE; Poetics, 1705) of the complex tragic plot as having a tripartite division of reversal, recognition, and catastrophe is one of the most valuable formalist analyses of the structure of tragedy ever made.

Aristotle’s approach to poetics was not intrinsic but extrinsic, however, was made clear by his twentieth-century followers, the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians Ronald S. Crane and Elder Olson. They were the harshest critics of what they regarded as the limited critical perspective of modern formalists, pointing out that an Aristotelian analysis was characteristically in terms of four causes. These were the formal cause (the form that the work imitates), the material cause (the materials out of which the work is made), the efficient cause (the maker), and the final cause (the effect on the reader or audience). Crane charged in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952) that the New Criticism is concerned with only one of these causes, language, in order to distinguish poetic from scientific and everyday uses of language but was unable to distinguish among the various kinds of poetry. It is true that formalism is largely concerned with literature as a verbal art. This single-mindedness has been its strength in explication as well as its weakness as a critical theory.

Two key concepts in the literary theory of the English Romantic period may have been influential on twentieth-century formalism. Although the New Critics were professedly anti-Romantic, following Eliot’s call for impersonality in modern poetry, their stress on the meaning of the total poem, rather than the meaning centered in a specific part, probably owes something to the concept of organic form, assumed by most Romantics and stated explicitly by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his defense of William Shakespeare. This is the concept that a poem grows like a living organism, its parts interrelated, its form and content inseparable; the total work is thus greater than the sum of its parts. This concept was assumed by all the New Critics except Ransom, who viewed “texture” as separate from structure.

The formalist view of creativity is of a rage brought to order through submission to the discipline of form. A good poem is characterized by tensions that are usually reconciled. The most detailed statement of this view by a New Critic is in Warren’s essay “Pure and Impure Poetry” (1943), in which Warren gives a long list of resistances or “tensions” in a good poem. The origin of this idea lies in Romantic critical theory. Warren’s statements, as well as Tate’s discussion of tension in his essay “Tension in Poetry” (1938), undoubtedly owe much to chapter 14 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he describes the distinctive quality of the creative imagination of the poet as revealing itself “in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.”

The strongest twentieth-century influences on formalism in the United States and in England were the early essays of Eliot, especially those in The Sacred Wood (1920), and two books by I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929). Eliot, influenced by the anti-Romanticism of T. E. Hulme in Speculations: Essays and Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1924), called for a theory of the impersonal in the modernist view of poetry to rectify the personality cults of Romantic and Victorian poetry, and he even detailed how to impersonalize personal emotions through the use of “objective correlatives.” Eliot’s intention was to redirect critical attention from the poet to the work of art, which he declared to be autotelic, or self-contained, a fictive world in itself. It was this pronouncement of Eliot, more than any statement in his essays in the 1920s, which had the strongest influence on the development of formalist criticism.

Eliot also devised his own version of a Cartesian “split” between logic and untrustworthy feelings, his theory that a dissociation of sensibility took place in English poetry in the late seventeenth century. John Donne had a unified sensibility capable of devouring any kind of experience. In the Metaphysical poet, “there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought”: They could think feelings and feel thoughts. The New Critics were to develop a formalist approach to poetry that could show this kind of sensibility at work. To a formalist such as Brooks in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), Metaphysical poetry was the proper tradition in which to fit modern poetry, and critical techniques were needed to explicate the complexities of poetry in the tradition. He provided a model for formalist explication in a brilliant analysis of parallelisms and ironic contrasts used functionally by Eliot in The Waste Land (1922).

The formalist defense of poetry

Formalism in the United States and England may have evolved in reaction to nineteenth-century literary thought and practice as a method of understanding modernist literature that was indirect, impersonal, complex, and autotelic. As far as the New Critics were concerned, however, their formalism was a defense of poetry in an age of science. Their criticism can quite properly be regarded as an “apology” for poetry in the tradition of Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley. An “apology” is a formal defense of poetry in an age thought to be hostile to the poetry of its own time. Sidney apologized for poetry at a time when Puritans were attacking drama and voicing suspicions as to whether poetry could and did advance morality. Shelley defended the value of poetry in an age that was beginning to turn to prose, assuming that the golden age of poetry was over. In this tradition, the New Critics apologized for poetry in an age of logical positivism, when the scientific method was regarded as the sole means to truth, and poetry was being limited to mere emotive effects.

In his Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards sought to find a place for poetry in an age of science by emphasizing the psychological effects of poetry on the personality of the reader. In Practical Criticism, he documented the helplessness of his graduate students when confronted with an unidentified poem to explicate, making a case for a literary criticism that specialized in explicating the text. Richards seemed, however, at least in the earlier book, to be in agreement with the positivistic view that poetry was a purely emotive use of language, in contrast to science, which was the language of factual assertion. Although influenced by Richards, the New Critics attempted to counter his apparent denial of a cognitive dimension of poetry. They did this through their formalism, staying inside the poem in their explications and declaring it characteristic of the poet’s use of language to direct the reader to meanings back inside the poem rather than to referents outside the poem.

Brooks contended that poets are too direct at pointing to everyday referents outside the poem and that the meanings of a poem cannot be wrenched outside the context of the poem without serious distortions. He was making a case for meaning in the poem and, at the same time, was keeping poetry out of direct competition with science. In a poem, he asserted, apparently referential statements are qualified by ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies so that the knowledge offered cannot stand as a direct proposition apart from the poem itself. This is why it does not matter that John Keats, in a famous sonnet, credits Hernán Cortés, not Vasco Núñez de Balboa, with the first sighting by a European of the Pacific Ocean. What Keats writes is true to the poem, not to historical fact, and he does not intend a truth claim to be taken outside the poem and examined for factual accuracy. Murray Krieger argued quite plausibly in The New Apologists for Poetry (1956) that the New Critics might be called “contextualists” because of their insistence on getting meaning in context and from the context.

Each major New Critic was, in his own way, trying to establish that poetry offers a special kind of knowledge and does not compete with the more referential knowledge that Richards found characteristic of scientific assertions. Their apology for poetry committed them to formalism, to directing critical attention intrinsically to the structure of the poem rather than extrinsically to referents outside. Ransom, in The World’s Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941), even departed from the concept of organic form to argue that the main difference between scientific and poetic language was that while both had “structure,” only the latter had “texture,” details that are interesting in themselves. Through “texture,” the poet expresses their revulsion against the inclination of science to abstract and to categorize by giving their reader the particulars of the world, the “sensuous apprehension of thought” that Eliot had admired in the Metaphysical poets. To Ransom, this was knowledge of “the world’s body.” Ransom’s single most important contribution to formalism was his often anthologized essay, “Poetry: A Note on Ontology” (1934).

The most philosophically inclined of the New Critics, Tate, also made a specific claim that literature offers a special kind of knowledge, more complete than the knowledge of science. It is experiential knowledge rather than the abstracted, shorthand version of experience given by science. Tate argued that a special characteristic of poetic language is the creation of “tension,” a kind of balance between the extremes of too much denotation and literalness and too much connotation and suggestiveness. A good poem possesses both a wealth of suggestiveness and a firm denotative base. In his essay “Tension in Poetry,” he provided examples of tension as a kind of touchstone for critical judgments.

In “Pure and Impure Poetry,” Warren presented his own version of the concept of tension, one closer to Coleridge’s than Tate’s was. Warren was also influenced by Richards’s concept of a “poetry of inclusion” (in turn derived from Coleridge), a poetry that contains its own oppositions. Warren believed that such an “impure” poet writing in modern times must “come to terms with Mercutio,” that is, use irony to qualify direct propositions, much as Shakespeare used the realistic, bawdy jests of Mercutio to counter the sentimental love poetry in Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1597). Such irony is accessible only through formalist analysis of the poem itself, a close reading of the text. As a formalist, Warren believed, as the other New Critics did, in a less accessible meaning beyond the usual public meaning.

The practice of formalism

Brooks was the most consistent practicing formalist and the most influential as well, whether in collaboration with Warren, in their popular textbooks, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), or in his own studies in formalism, Modern Poetry and the Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). In Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Brooks extended Eliot’s concept of tradition to a selective history of poetry from seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry to twentieth-century modernism. The proper tradition for the modern poet was the Metaphysical tradition because “hard” Metaphysical conceits conveyed both thought and feeling and maintained a proper balance, in contrast to the excessive emotion in much Romantic poetry and the excessive rationalism in much neoclassical poetry. Brooks wrote the book to show the relationship between Metaphysical and modern poetry and to explain modern poetry to readers whose understanding of poetry was primarily based on Romantic poetry.

Brooks’s next book, The Well Wrought Urn, was slightly revisionist, expanding the tradition to include some of the best works of Romantic and Victorian poetry, and even a major poem of the neoclassical period, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). The test for admission to the tradition is again a careful formalist analysis, revealed, in unexpected places, tensions, and paradoxes—although the formalist technique has been refined and even expanded. Brooks contended that poetry is “the language of paradox,” evident even in a poem such as William Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” (1807). The paradox central to the structure of the poem is that a city, London, is enabled to “wear the beauty of the morning,” a privilege that Wordsworth usually reserves for nature. The city is also paradoxically most alive with this surprising beauty when it is asleep, as it is on this occasion. Brooks conceded that Wordsworth’s employment of paradox might have been unconscious, something he was driven to by “the nature of his instrument,” but paradox can also be a conscious technique, as it was in John Donne’s “The Canonization” (1633).

Brooks’s analysis of “The Canonization” is a model of formalist method, as his analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land had been in his previous volume. The poem is complex but unified, an argument dramatically presented but a treatise on the important subject of divine and profane love as well. The tone, an important element of meaning, is complex, scornful, ironic, and yet quite serious. Also central in the poem is the “love metaphor,” and basic to its development is the paradox of treating profane love as if it were divine love. Such a treatment permits the culminating paradox in the speaker’s argument for his love: “The lovers in rejecting life actually win to the most intense life.” In this poem, technique has shaped content: The only way in which the poet could say what the poem says is by means of paradox.

Brooks made another major contribution to formalist practice in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). He demonstrated the importance of the dramatic context as the intrinsic referent for meaning in a poem. Even the simplest lyric has some of the drama of a play. There are within a poem a speaker, an occasion, sometimes an audience, and a conflict—in a lyric, usually a conflict of attitudes. Brooks declared in the chapter “The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition” that a poem should not be judged by the truth or falsity “of the idea which it incorporates, but rather by its character as drama.…” The formalist as a New Critic, most fully represented by an explication according to Brooks’s formula, is concerned with this drama in the poem, with how the conflict of attitudes is resolved, with paradox and how it is central to argument in poetry, with metaphor and how it may be the only permissible way of developing the thought of the poem. He is concerned with technique in a verbal art, and these techniques make possible the poetic communication of what becomes the content.

Ranking with The Well Wrought Urn as a major formalist document is René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949). When it was published, the intention of the book was to argue for the use of intrinsic approaches to literature, drawing on New Criticism, Russian Formalism, and even phenomenology, in conjunction with literary history and the history of ideas, then the dominant approaches. Its value today is as a sourcebook of formalist theory, just as Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn is a sourcebook of formalist practice. Wellek and Warren make the distinction between the scientific use of language, ideally purely denotative, and the literary use of language, not merely referential but expressive and highly connotative, conveying the tone and attitude of the speaker and writer. Form and content are regarded as inseparable: Technique determines content. Reference to the Russian Formalists reinforces the New Critics on this point. Meter, alliteration, sounds, imagery, and metaphor are all functional in a poem. Poetry is referential, but the references are intrinsic, directed back inside the fictive world that is being created. Alliteration, sounds, imagery, and metaphor are all functional in a poem. Poetry is referential but the references are intrinsic, directed back inside the fictive world that is being created.

The decline of formalism

The influence of formalism reached its peak in the 1950s and began to decline in the 1960s. In England, Scrutiny suspended publication; although Leavis continued to publish, his criticism became less formalistic and more Arnoldian. In the United States, the New Critics also became less formalistic, and their formalism was taken over by followers who lacked the explicative genius of Ransom, Tate, Brooks, and Warren.

Warren had always published less formal criticism than his colleagues, and in the 1960s, he turned his attention even more to fiction and, especially, to writing poetry. Tate, never as fond as the others of critical explications, continued to write essays of social and moral significance, moving in and out of Catholicism and the influence of Jacques Maritain. His best critical explication remained that of his own poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1937), an exploration of the creative process as well as a formalistic analysis. He died in 1979. Ransom continued to edit the most important new critical journal, Kenyon Review, until his retirement from Kenyon College. He then returned to something he had put aside for many years—his poetry. In the few essays that he wrote in the years just before his death in 1974, his Kantian interests preoccupied him more and more. Brooks wrote one more book that might be called formalistic, A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer’s Craft (1971), but he turned most of his attention to his two major books on William Faulkner, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) and William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978). In these works, Brooks brilliantly discusses Faulkner’s novels, but it is clear that his interest is more in the relationship of Faulkner’s fiction to his Southern society than in formalist analysis.

Newer critical approaches appeared, none of which was content to remain within the structure of the poem itself—the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, the phenomenological criticism of Georges Poulet and J. Hillis Miller, the structuralism of Roland Barthes, and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. The latter were influential but were more concerned with the modes of literary discourse than with the explication of texts, and they were better with fiction than with poetry.

During the protest movement of the later 1960s, formalism fell into disrepute because of its lack of concern for the social and political backgrounds of literary works. Ironically, the New Critics were accused of empiricism and scientism in the analysis of literature. Nevertheless, twentieth-century formalism has had a seemingly permanent influence on the teaching of literature in the United States, just as it has in France. Most literature introductory courses remain primarily formalistic in their approaches.

The New Critics taught a generation of students the art of close reading of the text. They warned readers against fallacies and heresies in reading and teaching poetry, and the lessons seem to have been widely learned. Although they used paraphrase masterfully themselves, they warned against “the heresy of paraphrase.” The prose statement should not be regarded as the equivalent of the meaning of the poem. They attacked and seemingly permanently damaged the positivistic view that would limit poetry to the emotions only—what they called the affective fallacy. As Brooks declared in The Well Wrought Urn, “Poetry is not merely emotive…but cognitive. It gives us truth.…” Formalism did not prevent, but did restrict, the practice of the biographical fallacy, studying the poet instead of their works.

The most controversial fallacy exposed by the New Critics was the intentional fallacy, against which all the formalists warned. Monroe C. Beardsley and William K. Wimsatt, who stated (in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 1954) what was implicit in formalism all along, may have gone too far in seeming to exclude the poet from throwing any light at all on the meaning of their poem; they did, however, warn against finding the meaning of a work in some prose statement by the author before or after they wrote it. Formalism has made the point that the actual intention of a poem can be determined only from an explication of the poem itself. Few literary critics today would regard the poem as a fictive world that is sufficient unto itself. Poems have thematic and psychological contexts as well as verbal and dramatic contexts. Formalist analyses were too innocent of the linguistic structures of the language that poetry used. Nevertheless, no modern critical approach has revealed more of the richness of meaning potentially available within a poem.

In interviews throughout the 2010s and 2020s, poet, translator, and literary critic Dana Gioia expressed her opinions on the formalist movement, New Critics, and literary movements in general. Most importantly, Gioia noted the fleeting nature of literary movements—leading poets whose work stands out as a prime example of a particular movement eventually become mainstream poets, striking a reasonable balance between their artistic stance and the greater volume of work at the time. However, these movements can spur lasting change.

For example, Gioia recounted being told by leading experts in 1975 that poetry was becoming more complex, was increasingly geared toward an upper-class audience, and that rhyme, meter, and narrative were dead in poetry. Gioia noted that taking an expressive art form like poetry away from average individuals in this way resulted in an experimental, reinvented oral poetry commonly known as rap and hip hop. In ten years, rhyme, meter, and narrative rose from essentially extinct to become one of the most popular music types. Gioia drew similar parallels in the invention of slam poetry, cowboy poetry, and new formalism.

Bibliography

Beck, Charlotte H. Robert Penn Warren, Critic. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 2006.

Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. 1939. Reprint. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry. 4th ed. Reprint. Boston, Heinle & Heinle, 2003.

Cowan, Louise. The Southern Critics: An Introduction to the Criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Andrew Lytle. Dallas, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1997.

"Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire (Ep. 119)." Conversations with Tyler, 7 Apr. 2021, conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/dana-gioia. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Davis, Garrick, ed. Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism. Columbus, Ohio University Press, 2008.

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Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. 1941. Reprint. Westport, Greenwood Press, 1980.

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Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. 1968. 3d ed. Wilmington, ISI Books, 1999.

Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. 1954. Reprint. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

Winchell, Mark Royden. Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1996.