Originally published in Sparrow: A Yearbook of the Sonnet,  Issue 61, 1994, under the title “Breaking the Linear Deadlock”.

From the first, the revival of meter and narrative in contemporary American poetry has been branded as regressive and reactionary.  The very name by which this movement has called by its detractors, the “New Formalism”, suggests a deliberately backward turn or, at best, an old meal warmed over.  For Diane Wakoski, such “old fashioned” poets, “nourished on Tennyson” and “influenced by nineteenth century English sounding poetry” are “running frightened” and “simply don’t feel confident in fighting the battle for what is new and different any longer.” (1)  For Ira Sadoff, such poets wish “to restore art to (a) nostalgic ideal”. (2)  For Joseph Conte, New Formalist poets are involved in “a retrogressive revival of not only the traditional forms but also the poetics of half a century ago” (3), while for Vernon Shetley, who characterizes their use of metrical forms as an act of “resurrect(ion)”, such poets “seem to imagine that poetry can stand aside from the general tide of culture”. (4) 

            All of these descriptions stand on the same shaky edifice.  Opposing the superior new to the inferior old, they implicitly uphold a model of literary history which is rigidly linear – a model which sees literature as forever progressing towards some unnamed, ineffable ideal, by means of one avant-garde revolution after another, each more radically liberating than the last.  It is the validity of this nineteenth-century model of artistic innovation which this essay proposes to question.

            In the visual arts, linear model of art history has been widely regarded, for some twenty years now, as meaninglessly reductive.  The spirit of prohibitive censure that such a model fosters toward all art outside its own narrow confines—and which was particularly characteristic of Modernism in its latter stages—has gradually yielded to a new spirit of openness in which artists, in a way unprecedented for over a century, feel free to employ whatever traditional, pre-Modernist techniques, genres and modes they care to, without being perceived as reactionary. 

In contemporary American poetry, in contrast, the late-Modernist spirit of censure lives on, with the result that poets who write in disregard of approved principles are attacked with a moralistic rancor of the sort not seen in the art world since the mid-1950s.  This essay will examine the assumptions which underlie such attacks and, looking to parallel developments in the visual arts as a basis for comparison, suggest an alternative perspective to the common portrayal of New Formalism as a reactionary phenomenon.

By “New Formalism”, a wholly inadequate term, I refer not merely to the widespread revival of regular meter and rhyme, but equally to the resurgence of the pre-Modernist genres and modes, particularly narrative, which is closely associated with New Formalism.  To divide so-called “New Narrative” from “New Formalist” poetry is misleading because the revival both of narrative and of regular meter appears to arise from a similar impulse and to be criticized according to similar premises.  Also, as has been frequently noted, both by practitioners and by critics of narrative poetry, some element of formal structure is probably indispensable to the sustaining of any long poem.  Finally, by New Formalism, I do not refer to a small number of particular poets but to the widespread and decentralized resurgence of “discredited” forms and genres among a growing number of otherwise unaffiliated poets across the country, a phenomenon which tends to be overlooked when New Formalism is passed off shrewdly by its critics as a localized conspiracy.

At its outset over a century ago, the avant-garde began as an enemy of tradition, enacting a self-conscious break with history.  Soon, however, prevailing ideas of scientific, industrial and social “progress” fostered a view of the avant-garde as a “leading edge”, an instrument of its inevitable evolution.  As this idea gained currency, the image of the avant-garde artist was gradually transformed from cultural pariah to cultural champion.  Concurrent with this development was a gradual but unavoidable narrowing of what were seen, at any given moment, to be art’s available possibilities.  Because the past was the enemy of progress, anything associated with the past came to be viewed with suspicion.  Innovation, in some form, had always been present in the arts, but had been balanced with an abiding respect, even veneration, for past accomplishments, so that even an artist as radically original as Blake, or as ardently revolutionary as Shelley, was steeped in a knowledge of the classics, the Bible and of history generally.  Only with the advent of the avant-garde did innovation become a weapon to be wielded against the past.  Prior to the avant-garde, the process of innovation involved the creative adaptation of older techniques: it was largely a process of addition.  With avant-garde, however, innovation became more a matter of the elimination of traditional techniques, styles, genres, perspectives, subject-matter, and so forth.  At times, as with Cubism, innovations were genuinely creative but, as a rule, innovation proceeded by means of subtraction.  As this process continued into the twentieth-century, and particularly after World War II, it became ever more deterministic, with each innovation leading irresistibly to the next, like an aesthetic chain reaction—the field of art’s possibilities narrowing, in the end, to a fine point of abstract purity.  As articulated at the time by such Modernist critics as Clement Greenburg, who described its “inexorable . . . logic” (5),  this process was seen not only as desirable but as historically inevitable.

Art, by this model,  necessarily becomes more and more exclusionary, more elitist and, ultimately, more modish.  Artists, to stay ahead of the game, must be cognizant of each innovation in the process, so as to avoid avenues which are no longer considered legitimate.  Mavericks who ignore the process, who insist on their right to emply discredited techniques or perspectives, are simply written out of art’s ongoing history.  Artists within the process, meanwhile, are under increasing pressure to maintain their position on the “leading edge”, which is continually shrinking.  Invariably, most lose their footing and fall by the wayside.  As the edge sharpens, the process moves with increasing speed, until the edge becomes virtually a point, from which the only remaining possibility is to vanish.

Such an apotheosis occurred in the early nineteen-sixties: a state of pur abstraction was achieved in a culmination of the entire progressive history of Modernism, at which point the model of art history as an inevitable sequence of necessary innovations began to fall apart.  To artists who were caught up in that history, the collapse of the model was catastrophic, like a falling away of the earth.  For a time, the void was filled by Pop Art and kitsch, which appeared overnight like fungus on the trunk of a fallen oak: amusing and diverting, but infinitely slight in comparison to the oak itself.  Modernist Art was dead and, for a time, the first “post Modernist” artists, deprived of any clear direction, could think of little but to frolic amid its ruins like children.  It was, after all, the sixties.

More recently, the entire field of artistic possibilities which had been eliminated by the Modernist/avant-garde model has come to be seen as still available.  As the tenets of Modernism have undergone a process of scrutiny and reconsideration, so also have all those earlier tenets that had been discredited by Modernism been recently reconsidered.  With the Dragon dead, the surviving artists have broken into its hoard to recover all it had stolen from them over the course of more than a century.  Traditional genres such as landscape and historical painting have experienced a resurgence, while the concept of avant-garde originality (among other concepts), is relentless mocked by the practice of “appropriation”.

    This essay began with the observation that New Formalism has been repeatedly characterized as regressive and of employing techniques which are outmoded.  As already noted, it is not such techniques of genres, but the linear historical model itself, upon which such accusations are based, which is no longer viable.  If, as its critics assert, New Formalism were nothing more than a futile exercise in nostalgia, it would scarcely have been noticed in the first place.  The amount of active antagonism it has sparked from the beginning is evidence not only of its vitality, but of something more.  To the mainstream of contemporary American poetry, New Formalism threatens certain critical pieties in a way that Language poetry, for instance, does not.  Both Language poetry— as the latest version of the Modernist myth of the avant-garde— and mainstream poetry— with its iconoclastic heritage of Deep Image, Confessional and Beat poetics— are deeply invested in the same linear historical model.  Both schools see literature as progressive and themselves, in both the political and aesthetic sense, as revolutionary vehicles of that progress.  For the Language poets, the revolution is primarily philosophical;  for mainstream poets, the revolution is more psychological and social— but, for both, it rests on the assumption that the history of literature is a linear process which must be continually carried forward by the “ground breaking” artist.

In the criticism of Wakoski, Sadoff, Conte, Shetley, and others, New Formalist poets are dismissed in terms of the very historical linearity which, by their practice, they no longer acknowledge.  This is a point which, so far at least, seems lost upon such critics, as if they cannot imagine anyone betraying the linear Modernist model.  They are so bound by their own conventional view of literary progress that they cannot conceive of another paradigm:  “You must go forward,” they insist, “you cannot go back!”

A situation similar to this existed thirty years ago in the visual arts.  In a recent essay, Arthur C. Danto describes the effect of William de Kooning’s figurative paintings of women when they appeared in 1953:

…when those works were first exhibited, they were widely seen as betrayals.  I think it impossible to convey to an audience of today the atmosphere of dogma that defined art world discourse in those years.  Critical debate would be advanced in such phrases as “You can’t do that!” … In painting in the ‘50s there was thought to be only one true historical possibility, what one must call materialist abstraction, because it was about the materials of painting and nothing else. (6)

Just as the progress of Modernist art proceeded largely by a process of elimination of traditional techniques and subject matter, so, in the linear history of Modernist/Beat/Confessional/Deep Image/Language poetry, has innovation proceeded chiefly by means of eliminating, wholly or in part, resources traditionally available to poets: rhyme, regular meter, alliteration, assonance, genres such as meditative ode, ballad, epigram, pastoral elegy, epic;  qualities such as melodiousness or simplicity and even, as in painting, the subject itself.

In the visual arts, the whole, century-long process of elimination, of reduction, is now viewed with a relentless skepticism.  The aesthetic Puritanism of the Abstract-Impressionist era has given way to an unprecedented climate of openness in which the artist feels free to work in any genre, and to emply any techniques, he or she may choose.  No longer bound to a single historically mandated course, artists, for the first time since the birth of Modernism, range back freely through history, creating in whatever manner serves the purpose at hand.  To be sure, in places like the Whitney, there are still artists who seem to think of themselves as avant-garde, but they no longer admit it openly: they keep their Party badges pocketed, their sustaining illusions a secret.

We must look elsewhere for genuine innovation.  Consider, for example, the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum (whose work is featured in the Winter 1994 issue of The Gettysburg Review).  Here is an artist who paints in the seventeenth-century Baroque manner of Titian and Velazquez, a manner completely untenable under Modernist doctrine, by which his work would be judged a priori as stale, lifeless, and derivative.  In fact, Nerdrum’s paintings are immediately arresting, powerfully symbolic, and altogether unique.  In remote landscapes both Biblical and post-Apocalyptic in their desolation, his figures, either naked or dressed in vaguely medieval robes and headgear, are presented in attitudes which defy analysis but which carry the emotional resonances of metaphor, like figures out of the Inferno, forever cast in emblematic postures and expressions.  But, just as we accustom ourselves to the idea of an ancient or timeless realm, we notice that some of the figures carry rifles as well as staffs and, in their vast and mountainous landscapes, resemble Afghani rebels as much as Dantesque wanderers.  In Nerdrum’s paintings, the ancient past and imminent future converge menacingly in the present.  Time, in his art, is neither linear nor even cyclical; rather, it is compressed and expansive simultaneously, expressive of Breughel and Dali at once.  To comprehend an artist such as Nerdrum, any notion of art as a progressive process would prove hopelessly inadequate.

Imagine a comparable poet in this country just now—  one who would write, say, magniloquent lyrics suggestive of Marvell or pastoral dramas after Milton.  How would he be received?  His work would be dismissed out-of-hand, probably with no one even bothering to read it, for that is what happens repeatedly to the greater part of New Formalist work.  Many critics who write in order to dismiss New Formalist poets do not discuss the actual poems at all, or do so only superficially, concentrating only on conspicuously weak examples.

By glossing over or ignoring the actual poems, critics are free to generalize about the New Formalist practice of reviving pre=Modernist genres and forms, and to dismiss this practice as, in Conte’s phrase, “inevitably creating a stagnant and derivative poetry.” (7)  But in the arts, nothing is inevitable.  Whether a given approach will result in strong or in stagnant poetry is a question answerable solely by the poets themselves.  The proof is in the poem, not the prescription.

So imbued have we become with attitudes of indifference toward the past, that we may well ask what is to be gained by adapting past methods to present needs.  By viewing the present, as it were, through the distant lens of the past, the artist is able to discover aspects of the present imperceptible at shorter range.  Continuities and contrasts between past and present are sharpened and placed in clearer perspective.  By adapting the model of Virgil’s Georgics to describe a downpour in a London slum, Jonathan Swift altered our perception of both the classical model and the contemporary reality.  Employing past models to treat contemporary subjects is like the practice of deep plowing, where long-buried nutrients are brought to the surface to replenish an exhausted field.

In America, in the first half of this century, only a handful of renegades continued to tap the older traditions discarded by Modernism: notably Robinson, Frost and Jeffers, who, though not Modernist in the conventional academic sense, were indisputably modern and original in their styles and subjects.  Now, at century’s end, the practical wisdom of employing older traditions is gaining new appreciation and adherence.  To face steadily the chaos of the present, it may be best to set one’s roots as possible in the bedrock of the past.  To chronicle the complex and original uses made of past modes by certain contemporary poets would require, at the least, a book-length study.  The uses made of pastoral alone would require such a study, and there is room here only to mention a few examples in passing.  The realistic pastoral-narrative tradition of Wordsworth’s “Michael” sustains not only (by way of Masters), the rural Indiana narratives of Jared Carter but, less expectedly, (by way of Jeffers), Mark Jarman’s book-length Kentucky to California saga, “Iris” and (by way of Frost), Dana Gioia’s dark interior monologue of a murderer, “The Homecoming”.  Other poets working in the deep, rich vein of pastoral—  though in its more stringent neo-classical, Jonsonian plain style—  are David Middleton and the late John Finlay, who find in its clarity, poise, and classical allusions, a particularly apt vehicle for their evocations of Southern history and culture.  Timothy Steele, in contrast, though he works in the same neo-classical mode, strives at effects which are altogether more deft and lyrical than one would think possible in that vein.  And pastoral is but one of several modes in use.  Julia Alvarez has revived the sonnet sequence as a narrative mode of autobiographical self-dramatization;  Gjertrud Schnackenberg has reinvented the high formalist style—  dense and allusive—  for her religious meditations;  Charles Martin’s cryptic, paradoxical lyrics, epistemological and erotic, look back through Pound to the English Metaphysicals and Roman love poetry, while R.S. Gwynn, in his darkly ironic depictions of academia and of Southern working-class life, appears to combine several genres and modes, from the precisely honed barbs of Augustan satire to the brief, bitter, proto-Modernist narratives of Hardy and Robinson.

The extent of what is possible in the use of traditional modes can be found in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.  Building directly upon the Classical epic tradition and employing a supple line modeled on the Classical hexameter and a terza rima stanza adapted from Dante, Walcott fashions a post-colonial epic of contemporary Caribbean life which draws freely and audaciously from the whole of European literary tradition.  Walcott makes unstinting use of pre-Modernist modes, genres and devices: assonance, alliteration, melodiousness, rhyme, metaphor, symbolism, allusion, allegory, epic simile, narrative, history and mythology—  all combined in a range of diction extending from literary to island patois—  to create a lush, Elizabethan richness marvelously suited to the poem’s tropical setting.  By placing his characters squarely in the heroic tradition of Homer (they even have such names as Achilles, Hector, Helen, Philoctete, etc), Walcott enables us to see not only the ancient Greek within the contemporary Antillean, but the common islander within the Classical hero—  both worlds bound by the same immutable laws of the sea, and of human nature.

In the universe of Walcott’s imagination, the contemporary world is so interpenetrated and haunted by the ancient, that every mundane fact becomes mythic, from an old black oarsman, rowing the poet across an island lagoon, who becomes the “charred ferryman”, Charon, with “a dead whiff of alcohol on his breath”, ferry the poet across the river Styx into the realm of the dead—  to an outdoor market where every fish, fruit and vegetable resonates with some ancient significance:

Where did it start?  The iron roar of the market,

with its crescent moons of Mohammadan melons,

with hands of bananas from a Pharoah’s casket,

lemons gold as the balls of Etruscan lions,

the dead moon of a glaring mackerel; it increases

its pain down the stalls, the curled heads of cabbages

crammed on a tray to please implacable Caesars,

slaves head-down on a hook, the gutted carcasses

of crucified rebels, from orange-tiled villas,

from laurels of watercress, and now it passes

the small hearts of peppers, nippled sapodillas

of virgins proffered to the Conquistadors.

The stalls of the market, contained the Antilles’

history as well as Rome’s, the fruit of an evil,

where the brass scales swung and were only made level

by the iron tear of the weight, each brass basin

balanced on a horizon, but never equal,

like the old world and new, as just as things might seem.  (8)

Of African blood, and with an African’s natural suspicion of things European, Walcott, paradoxically, in his long career as a poet, has drawn more deeply from Western culture than all but a handful of his peers.  If he also, on many levels, wages war against that culture, he does so all the more magnificently for meeting it on its own terms, in the monumental mold of its own Classical past.

            There are, then, undeniable precedents for the practice of turning to older traditions as a means of revitalizing the arts but, after a century of avant-garde hostility toward anything older than the day before yesterday, we have developed a phobia toward the past which has become a curse of fear and forgetfulness.  As contemporary poets, we labor under a burden, not of the distant Classical, but of the recent Modernist past.   As a poet of Walcott’s caliber demonstrates, the modes and methods of the distant past can be powerful tools in the present, provided we are not still shackled by avant-garde/Modernist precepts discrediting their use.  Such precepts belong to a century which is all but finished.  They are a ball and chain which belong, not around out ankles, but at the bottom of a swamp.

FOOTNOTES

1.      Diane Wakoski, “The New Conservatism in American Poetry”,  American Book Review, November/December 1986,  p. 3.

2.      Ira Sadoff,   “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia”,  American Poetry Review, January/February 1990,  p. 8.

3.      Joseph M. Conte,  Unending Design: The Forms of Post-Modern Poetry  (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991),  p. 291.

4.      Vernon Shetley,  After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America  (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1993),  p.  190.

5.      Clement Greenberg,  “Modernist Painting”,  Art & Literature, Spring, 1965.

6.      Arthur C. Danto,  “Art after the End of Art”,  Artforum,  April 1993,  p. 67.

7.      Conte,  pp 282-3.