Formal Poetry and Related Terms: Formalism, New Formalism, Neo-Formalism, Pseudo-Formalism, Neo-Classicism, Traditional Poetry, and the Multitudinous Variations Thereof

by Michael R. Burch, editor of The HyperTexts

Socrates insisted that we define our terms before engaging in otherwise frivolous, fruitless debate. What better way to define "formal poetry," "traditional poetry" and associated terms, than to quote and cite knowledgeable, passionate practitioners thereof? And so, here goes ...

What is traditional poetry? What is the poetic tradition? Is it a whitewashed sepulcher full of dead men's albescent bones, or is it a veritable fountain of youth? Should we shun the tradition like a pale, diseased leper, or approach it with trembling awe, like the treasure hoard of a firebreathing dragon?

Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately--not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair. -- Dana Gioia

The Endless Conversation
by Michael R. Burch

The living and the dead convene,
and here the Book of Life is read.
Each fallen grain of wheat, life's bread,
and the trampled grape, love's wine. Serene,
the clouds of witnesses, the Host,
speak to the blood. They seem, almost,
like mortal men, their eyes more keen
for having wept yet seen, half blind.

There is no rancor; they are kind.
In childhood man was ever green
if prone to pine. They only say
such words as men at close of day.
They speak of visions distant, seen
beyond themselves: ahead, afar ...
Can they be wiser than we are?

A. E. Stallings tells us, "... verse can be divided into either free (unrhymed, metrically ad hoc by line) or formal (patterned in rhythm, sometimes rhymed)." But don't let the term "formal" throw you, because in poetry "formal" doesn't mean stuffy, stilted, provincial or academic. This (below) is formal poetry at its best, and poetry doesn't get much better, in any form:

Music, When Soft Voices Die
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Formal poetry doesn't require rhyme. The "dominant gene" of formal poetry is meter. But just what is meter? According to Louise Bogan, meter is simply rhythm, and she obviously knows whereof she speaks:

Song For The Last Act
by Louise Bogan

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

Now we're getting somewhere: the "dominant gene" of formal poetry is meter, and meter is the rhythm of words, a rhythm we can hear with our ears and tap our hands and feet in time to. Meter allows us to "keep time" with the poem, and perhaps verbalized meter was man's earliest method of marking and keeping time, having its roots in the rhythmic grunts and chants of cavemen that predate speech. We hear such rhythmic grunts from chimps and other primates, and these rhythmic vocalizations often seem to denote exuberance, celebration, joy. Perhaps the vocalization of rhythm is a way to release joy, rather than holding it within.

Eternity
by William Blake

He who binds to himself a joy,
Does the wingèd life destroy;
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity's sun rise.

Still not convinced on the rhyme thing? I know it's hard to give up, and I dearly love it myself. But think of popular songs. Most popular song lyrics rhyme, but not all do. A good example is "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow. But how, you might ask, if it doesn't rhyme, do we know that it is, indeed, a song? Simply because we can sing it; it carries a tune. Formal poetry works the same way: it has a "tune" integral to the words themselves. There are other formal elements besides meter, including the various poetic devices (assonance, consonance, metaphor, simile, symbolism, etc.) and the way the poem is presented on the page, but the bloodlines of formal poetry begin with meter. Here's a wonderful example of a poem that sings, but doesn't rhyme (or, more accurately, doesn't end-rhyme):

Lullaby
by W. H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away 
Individual beauty from 
Thoughtful children, and the grave 
Proves the child ephemeral: 
But in my arms till break of day 
Let the living creature lie, 
Mortal, guilty, but to me 
The entirely beautiful. 

Soul and body have no bounds: 
To lovers as they lie upon 
Her tolerant enchanted slope 
In their ordinary swoon, 
Grave the vision Venus sends 
Of supernatural sympathy, 
Universal love and hope; 
While an abstract insight wakes 
Among the glaciers and the rocks 
The hermit's carnal ecstacy.

Certainty, fidelity 
On the stroke of midnight pass 
Like vibrations of a bell 
And fashionable madmen raise 
Their pedantic boring cry: 
Every farthing of the cost. 
All the dreaded cards foretell. 
Shall be paid, but from this night 
Not a whisper, not a thought. 
Not a kiss nor look be lost. 

Beauty, midnight, vision dies: 
Let the winds of dawn that blow 
Softly round your dreaming head 
Such a day of welcome show 
Eye and knocking heart may bless, 
Find our mortal world enough; 
Noons of dryness find you fed 
By the involuntary powers, 
Nights of insult let you pass 
Watched by every human love.

Of course form is important to a formal poem. And yet there is something else essential to a formal poem, as to any poem: light. The poem is like the city on the hill, proclaiming itself to be Zion to a world shackled in darkness:

First Fig
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light!

And the true poet also has an antithetical purpose: to expose to the world everything that is not of the light: the canker, the worm, the darkness, the rottenous and the misbegotten:

The Sick Rose
by William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

The true poet also reveals himself to the world as both heretic and prophet. Was there ever a true prophet who was not considered a heretic in his or her own day? Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, ... the list is near endless.

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold
by William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
   A rainbow in the sky:          
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
   Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

The true poet is also an advocate: an advocate of the helpless, of the dispossessed, of the downtrodden, of the abused, of the neglected, of the forlorn, and of the ones far better unborn:

Cradle Song
by William Blake

Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.

O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.

The true poet is also a truthteller who never shirks from telling the truth. The truth is not that God is good and all-powerful, as religion would have us believe, but that God has been proven weak, pale and ineffectual because of death. Nothing that's good lasts as itself, nor returns as itself. Man, in the end, is mere compost for whatever supersedes him. All that's good, all the verdant greens of autumn, become the deathly golds of autumn, the harbingers of death and decay:

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

The true poet is unafraid to speak the truth, even to God. The poet is sager and wiser than the prophet, because he speaks the truth to God, rather than the reverse:

Directive
by Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Returning to our discussion of form and formalism, let us hear and heed Dana Gioia: "The form of a poem--be it in meter or free verse--must grow naturally out of its substance. The form and meaning are not merely inseparable; the form is an essential (if often ineffable) part of a poem's meaning. If the form seems mere decoration, if it appears arbitrary or excessive, if it calls attention to itself in ways that do not deepen the overall impact of the work, then the form is being used badly. The formal elements have not been successfully integrated into the totality of the work. This disjunction is not only a problem with bad poetry in traditional forms; it is a common failing of avant-garde art where technique often either becomes an end in itself or--more commonly--extreme styles are employed to mask banal content."

The most common English poetic form is the sonnet, which at first glance can seem "arbitrary and excessive" for almost any sensible purpose (and for most insensible purposes as well). The sonnet can, indeed, be a daunting form. A Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, a deterministic rhyme scheme, a logical sequence of progressions similar to a waltz that might be called "turn, turn, turn and counter-turn," and more esoteric rules than I care to shake my essay stick at. And yet passionate avowals can be conjured by great poets even from such infernal pressure cookers:

Sonnet 147
by William Shakespeare

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed,
       For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
       Who art as black as Hell, as dark as night.

Still, poets tend more and more to be rebels, and even Shakespeare ignored the rules he created when he found it necessary (or perhaps merely convenient) to do so. Other poets seem to be Houdini-like magicians intent on finding innovative ways of escaping every straightjacket, while wowing fans in the process. Two of my favorite sonnets are Robert Frost's "Acquainted With The Night," which has a terza rima rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc dad aa), and Percy Bysshe Shelley's delightfully ominous "Ozymandias" with its own idiosyncratic rhyme scheme (ababacdcedefef).

Acquainted With The Night
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Now that we've seen the undeniable good "luggage" that comes from good poets uplifting readers by accepting and bearing near-unendurable formal constraints, let's consider for a moment the bad "baggage" that comes part-and-parcel with certain poetic terms. For instance, A. E. Stallings cautions us that "the term 'neo formalism' ... is absurd. There is nothing new about form, nor has it ever ceased from being written ..."

I agree with Stallings. When we begin to split poetic hairs with terms like "Neo-Formalism" and "New Formalism" it seems we're merely denigrating the new by implying it's inherently a poor copy of, or substitute for, the old. Robert Frost wrote blank verse poems long years after John Milton, but I wouldn't for a minute call Frost "Neo-Miltonian."

I prefer the term "traditional" for poetry that embraces the entire English poetic tradition, although the term is often misconstrued today as meaning poetry that has both meter and rhyme. Which is by no means bad, but can be confusing, blank verse and accentual verse being well within the tradition. Perhaps a more useful term is "metrical," which would allow us two major categories of English poetry: metrical poetry and free verse. But the argument soon begins to tire, and I find myself sympathizing with Walter Savage Landor:

On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday
by Walter Savage Landor

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Can we so much as mention "traditional poetry" or "the tradition" without raising eyebrows and corresponding hackles? Dana Gioia says, "Tradition has become such a loaded word that one can hardly use it today without being misunderstood. One hears it employed mostly as a code word to signal a reactionary defense or radical attack on some body of work. But, as an artist, I see tradition as something quite different from a fixed or oppressive canon. It is neither static nor prescriptive. Tradition is a vast, living landscape we have inherited--so rich and varied that not only do we constantly discover new aspects of it, but the places we revisit always seem slightly different. In art, there is no absolute break between the past and present. One grows naturally out of the other. Moreover, once a new work is written, it exists in an eternal present tense with all the works of the past; and by finding its own place, each new work slightly changes everything around it. The heroic bluster of Romanticism and early Modernism makes it easy to forget that no artist exists in isolation. Art is a collective enterprise embracing past and present, artists and audience. There is also no single past. Artists choose their own predecessors, and great artists reconfigure the traditions to which they belong."

It's truly sad, I think, that our poetic forefathers labored long and hard to give us a rich heritage and a strong foundation, and yet today that heritage and foundation are mistrusted by (nay, even distasteful to) many  poets. I'm reminded of a wonderful poem by Robert Hayden:

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Of course there are negative impressions of contemporary formal poetry, even among those poets, critics and readers who admire the great poets of yore. One of the arguments against formal poetry is that it's artificial. A. E. Stallings again: "... Artifice is an advantage, not a hindrance, to expression. Is form artificial? Of course it is. I am all for the artificial. I am reminded of an anecdote. A lovely girl, with natural blonde hair, but of a rather dark, rather dingy shade, complains to a friend. She has wanted for a long time to get it highlighted, which she thinks will brighten her appearance, but with the qualms and vanity of a natural blonde, scruples about the artificiality of having her hair colored. At which point her friend laughs and declares, 'Honey, the point is to look natural. Not to be natural.'"

Stallings is right. A formal poem about a tree is no less "natural" than a sketch of a tree or "O Tannenbaum." Anyone who writes a poem, draws, or coins a song engages in artifice. Flowers are natural. When we bring them indoors, however, we don't toss them on the floor randomly, but we we create an artificial setting and arrange them to our personal liking in a manmade construct, a vase. The artifice is in the arrangement of what we love about nature, the flower, in accordance with our own mysterious whims. By the way, some of the best traditional poets can be very whimsical, for instance:

... New Formalism ... began as a counterrevolution against the deadening orthodoxy of the Free Verse Establishment. Fed up with the self-absorption, formlessness, and intellectual vacuity of confessional lyrics, which under the aegis of Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg, and Plath had swamped poetry for most of the twentieth century, a number of poets began to reclaim the heritage of English verse. They rescued fixed forms and meters from oblivion, they dusted off tropes and figures, they distinguished poetry's special language from quotidian speech, and they rediscovered what fictive craft means. They schooled themselves in their literary antecedents (in spite of an American educational system that fought ferociously to prevent it), they read history, and they studied foreign languages and literature. Most important of all, they saw no reason why one could not imagine a poem into existence rather than make every poem the record of some squalid personal trauma. To Pound's fatuous precept "Make it new!" they replied "Up yours, Ezra--we're making it old." And they were right to say so, for by 1980 Pound's modernist free verse had petered out into the earnestly prosaic drivel of institutionalized poetry workshops, or the politicized ranting of the poetry slam. Incidentally, Pound himself recognized the truth of this, for late in life he granted an interview to the New York Times wherein he was asked about the current poetry scene. The aged but still temperamental Pound exploded in response: "Disorder! Disorder! I can't be blamed for all this disorder!"

Dana Gioia quite rightly points out one of the many undeniable problems with mediocre (and worse) contemporary formal verse:

"Pseudo-formal" verse is a term that I coined to describe a common type of bad contemporary poem. It is a poem that employs formal principles so sloppily that they have no integrity. The lines appear roughly similar but lack the energy that regular rhythm gives. Pseudo-formal poems may be arranged in regular stanzas, but on close examination the visual form has no integral relation to the sound. A good poem rewards scrutiny. The closer one looks at any formal element in a pseudo-formal poem, the more arbitrary or imperfect it appears. Nothing survives close examination. It's just language chopped up into a vaguely regular shape without sufficient attention to sound or structure. It is neither good formal verse or good free verse—just a superficial pretense. And isn't one of the big problems with so much contemporary poetry that it's carelessly written and pretentiously presented?

In closing, I would like to simply say that I agree with T. S. Eliot that poetic time is relative. The past informs the present, and the present informs the past by reinterpreting it in light of all that has come and gone, and is currently coming and going, and all that seems likely to transpire soon. The test of a great poem is that is was great in its day, and that it remains great today, and that it is unthinkable that it will not be great tomorrow. There are certain poems that will, almost undeniably, always remain great, and are therefore eternal. "They Flee from Me" by Thomas Wyatt is such an eternal poem, and it sounds as startlingly original today as it did the day it was written:

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I rest my case, at least until my next tirade. May my detractors forever RIP. And thanks for listening, since you read so far! -- MRB

Credits and Credentials:

Dana Gioia has published two poetry collections, Daily Horoscope and The Gods of Winter (Graywolf Press, 1986 and 1991, respectively) and two critical collections, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf Press, 1992) and The Barrier of a Common Language: Essays on British and American Poetry (University of Michigan, 1996). His The Madness of Hercules, translated from Seneca, was published in 1995 by Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Joseph S. Salemi teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University, and in the Classics Department of both Hunter College and Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. He is a widely published scholar, translator, and poet whose work has appeared in over fifty journals and literary magazines in the United States and in Britain. As a translator, Salemi has rendered into English a wide selection of Latin, Greek, Provencal, and Sicilian poems, and his scholarly work has touched on writers as diverse as Chaucer, Machiavelli, Blake, Kipling, Crane, Ernest Dowson, and Wiffiam Gaddis.  He has won several awards, including the Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, the Lane Cooper Fellowship, and an N.E.H. Summer Seminar Fellowship.

A. E. Stallings is an American poet currently residing in Greece. Her first collection, Archaic Smile, is the recipient of the Richard Wilbur Award, and is published by the University of Evansville Press. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, the James Dickey Award from Five Points, and been included in Best American Poetry, 1994. She was included in Best American Poetry, 2000.

Michael R. Burch is the editor of The HyperTexts and has been published over 600 times in literary journals and sundry publications.