New formalism
The new formalism (Engl. New Formalism ) is a flow and movement of the American poetry of the late 20th century and the present, including a resumption of metric and rhyming poetry advocated.
background
The term 'New Formalism' was first used in this context in the article The Yuppie Poet in the AWP Newsletter in 1985, where the description should be seen as a criticism of a movement that is returning to traditional poetic forms; the article accused the movement not only political conservatism but also yuppie - materialism . Going back even further, it can be established in terms of conceptual history that as early as 1921, the “ Guide through modern literature ”, in which u. a. René Schickele collaborated, with the explanations of the term as characteristic of the formalism the "concern about the form" leading to "mostly detrimental to the uniqueness of the work" was indicated. In the dictionary of philosophical terms published by Johannes Hoffmeister in 1944 , formalism, as long as mathematical formalism is not meant, “the one-sided emphasis on form, the 'formal' as the only essential thing in being, knowing, thinking and living”.
The New Formalism was a response to various properties of contemporary poetry that were viewed as imperfections. The American writer and critic Michael Dana Gioia wrote in 1987 in his essay Notes on the New Formalism : "The real questions of American poetry of the eighties will become more obvious: the decline of poetic language, the boredom of poetry , the bankruptcy of Confessional Poetry , the Inability to create meaningful aesthetics for new poetic narratives and the denial of musical patterns in contemporary poems. The reawakening of traditional forms will then only be seen as the answer to this awkward situation. "
Despite the formal innovations of modernism, as manifested in the works of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound , and the widespread use of free verse in the first decades of the 20th century, numerous poets decided to continue working mainly with traditional forms - for this for example, the poets associated with New Criticism are counted, including John Crowe Ransom , Allen Tate , Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur . During the 1960s and with the dominance of confessional poetry, the publication of form-conscious poetry became increasingly out of fashion. The appearance of the Language poets in the 1970s was one of the responses to the prevalent informal confessional poetry. However, the "Language poets" were another step away from metric and rhyme and their poetry was seen in part as alienation from readers.
history
An early sign of renewed interest in poetic forms was the 1968 publication of Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics . In the early 1970s, XJ Kennedy published the short-lived magazine Counter / Measures , which was devoted to traditional forms of poetry. Few editors of this lyric were benevolent at the time, and the mainstream was against rhyme and metric.
The publication in 1977 of an issue of the Mississippi Review entitled Freedom and Form: American Poets Respond was an important impetus for the emergence of the New Formalism as an independent movement. A number of publications of traditional lyric poetry followed, including Robert B. Shaw's Comforting the Wilderness, (1977), Charles Martins Room for Error, (1978), and Timothy Steele's Uncertainties and Rest (1979). In 1980, Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell founded The Reaper magazine to promote this type of poetry as well as traditional prose. Jane Greer published the Plains Poetry Journal from 1981 , also with form-conscious poems. In 1984, McDowell founded the publishing house "Story Line Press", which has published poets of the New Formalism ever since.
The American professor William Baer founded the biannual journal The Formalist in 1990 , which he published until 2005. The first edition contained a. Poems by Howard Nemerov , Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice .
The West Chester University holds an annual conference with a focus on formal poetry and the new formalism since 1995th As part of this conference, the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award is presented each year .
Towards the end of the 20th century, poems were published again on a larger scale in their traditional form. The movement's influence was also felt in the mainstream of American poetry: an overview of the successively published anthologies showed an increase in poems in the form of the villanelle . The number of publications of literary treatises on poetic forms also increased.
The American poet Leo Yankevich founded the literary magazine The New Formalist in 2001 , which has since devoted itself to the publication of form-conscious poetry.
literature
- William Baer: Fourteen on Form. Conversations with Poets. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson MS 2004, ISBN 1-57806-671-9 .
- Christophe Fricker : For meter and blank verse! The New Formalists in American Poetry. In: Mercury . Vol. 61, No. 690, July 2007, pp. 627-632.
- Marjorie Levinson: What Is New Formalism? In: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Vol. 122, No. 2, March 2007, ISSN 0030-8129 , pp. 558-569.
- Robert McPhillips: The New Formalism. A Critical Introduction. Extended edition. Textos Books, Cincinnati OH 2005, ISBN 1-932339-68-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ see Nigel S. Thompson , 'Form and Function,' PN Review, 154; the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) article was of Ariel Dawson wrote
- ↑ Paul Lake, 'Expansive Poetry in the New Millennium' ( Memento of the original from March 7, 2005 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , a speech given at the West Chester Poetry Conference on June 10, 1999.
- ↑ Guide through modern literature, ed. HH Ewers, Globus Verlag, Berlin 1921, p. 179.
- ^ Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister: Dictionary of Philosophical Terms , Felix Meiner Verlag, Leipzig, 1944. P. 278.
- ↑ The Hudson Review (40, 3, 1987)
- ↑ The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics EP Dutton & Company, New York, 1968. A few years later Turco published a university textbook in which he presented poetry from the perspective of the writer and emphasized the use of formal elements - Poetry: An Introduction through Writing , Reston Publishing Co, 1973. ISBN 0-87909-637-3
- ↑ Timothy Steele mentions Don Stanford of The Southern Review , Tom Kirby-Smith of The Greensboro Review and Robert L. Barth in a conversation
- ↑ French, Amanda Lowry, Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle ( Memento of the original from July 21, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Dissertation, August 2004, page 13.
