Modernist and postmodernist poets may not agree on much, but they tend to be adamant that Pound, Eliot and Williams righteously obliterated the underpinnings of pre-modernist poetry. Accordingly, when contemporary poets embrace traditional prosody, the literary establishment often reacts with vitriol. Evelyn Waugh called England’s formal poets “a new wave of philistinism” and Edith Sitwell suggested that they wrote “lifeless quatrains” due to childhoods in “the cramped dimensions of prefabricated houses.”
Across the Atlantic, Duane Locke, a professor and founder of The Tampa Review, called formal poets “dehumanized writers of preconceived forms,” “enemies of poetry,” “barbarians” backed by “stooges,” “weaklings who have no interiority or mystic openness,” and “victims and slaves of the illusions self-manufactured by their conscious minds.”
Ariel Dawson blasted New Formalists as “yuppies” with “no strong view of the world, no personal vision.” Diane Wakoski called a formal poet “Milton’s Satan” and characterized New Formalists as Reagan Administration puppets. Ira Sadoff once hissed that formalism’s “authoritarian view of what constitutes music also leads to the trivializing of the art form.”
Despite this hostility, important formal poets emerged, first in Britain in the 1950s with “the Movement,” then in America in the 1980s with “New Formalism.” The Movement included such commercially successful poets as Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, and Elizabeth Jennings, as well as Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain and Kingsley Amis, who is better known as a novelist. Trying to enumerate the New Formalists is a longstanding parlor game, but any list of “founding members” should include Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele, Mary Jo Salter, Brad Leithauser, Annie Finch, Mark Jarman, Robert McDowell, R.S. Gwynn, Charles Martin, David Mason, and Molly Peacock.
In Transatlantic Connections, Theresa Malphrus Welford states her goal as a mix of history and literary criticism: “After describing the formation of the two groups, I shall examine the personal and textual connections between the New Formalists and Movement writers.”
The book’s description of the “formation” of the Movement relies heavily on secondary material written before 2005; its analysis of that material is invariably superficial and unfocused. For instance, there is a three-page subchapter on the “death” of the Movement that does not discuss the declared topic except to conclude summarily that “the Movement’s lifespan was brief but productive.”
Although the book’s discussion of “textual connections” focuses primarily on the influence of Philip Larkin, it passes over the drama around Andrew Motion’s savage 1994 official biography, a narrative that nearly drove Larkin out of the ranks of even the minor poets. It also passes over subsequent, largely successful, efforts to repair Larkin’s reputation as a poet, if not as a person.
Welford openly shares the academy’s contempt for Larkin, an attitude that keeps her from fully understanding the greatest influence on recent British and American formal poets. Larkin was role-playing much of the time, whether he was writing as a novelist of lesbian fiction in his youth, writing puerile letters in middle age, or presenting himself on camera as a parochial bloke. While Welford parrots the party line that Larkin was “notoriously prejudiced” against foreign countries, she seems unaware of surprising, but sound, 1997 articles by Barbara Everett and former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion (and harsh Larkin critic) that demonstrate Larkin’s debt to French symbolist poetry.
Brief discussions of other Movement poets are more superficial and often patronizing. The author seems uninterested in the significance of Elizabeth Jennings as a religious poet (she is similarly skittish about the superb religious poetry of New Formalist Mark Jarman) or Jennings’ enormous popularity in the UK. She says little about Kingsley Amis, the third member of the Movement to become a British celebrity (British light verse poet Wendy Cope’s best-selling 1986 book was titled Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis).
[left: Thom Gunn] The author skims over Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, and John Wain. British expatriates Thom Gunn and Donald Davie get more respect as she hunts for connections between her British and American poets, but she greatly overweights the influence of Davie, who evolved into more of a postmodernist, in her search for connections between British poets and their younger American counterparts.
She devotes disproportionate attention to New Formalism, but much of her analysis consists of article summaries followed by inconclusive annotations to those articles in the passive voice, such as “[w]hether Bergonzi or Martin is correct is not a matter that can be settled here.” Many of her sources are third-rate and quibble tiresomely about nomenclature and “membership.”
She relies on these essays, and thus incorporates their biases. Despite a warning from David Mason, she does not seem to accept that some of these essay writers implicitly — and occasionally explicitly — inflated their own significance by downplaying the importance of poets from the generation slightly younger than Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anthony Hecht, such as J.D. McClatchy, X.J. Kennedy, Robert B. Shaw, Rhina Espaillat, Wyatt Prunty, and Marilyn Hacker.
Welford has almost no source material about the acceleration of interest in New Formalism around 1990, the year University of Evansville professor William Baer founded an influential journal of formal poetry called The Formalist (succeeded by Measure and then Measure Review), which set a standard for aspiring formal poets. Baer also created the prestigious Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the University of Evansville Press, and the Richard Wilbur Award for outstanding books of formal poetry. In 1992 a Chicago postal worker named John Mella founded Light Quarterly (now a semiannual on-line journal) and barely kept light verse alive. Baer receives little attention in this book, and I believe Mella receives no mention at all (regrettably, the book lacks an index).
In this same time period, Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell co-founded Story Line Press, which helped to launch the careers of many important young formal poets, including Wil Mills, Elise Paschen, Greg Williamson, Kate Light and David Mason. McDowell was brilliant but erratic; after corporate bankruptcy he lost control of his press, which ended up as a subsidiary of Red Hen Press – the publisher of this book. Given that history, it is baffling that this book avoids Story Line’s significance.
In 1991 Dana Gioia, the poet and Stanford MBA who became Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, ignited national debate about formal poetry with his Atlantic Monthly essay “Can Poetry Matter?”, which he later expanded into a book. Four years later Gioia and Michael Peich co-founded the West Chester University Poetry Conference on Form and Narrative.
The West Chester conference created a grassroots community of formal poets, primarily non-academics, who collaborated and occasionally started journals. The conference thrived until it became the largest poetry-only conference in the country, but with the 2010 retirement of Michael Peich, the conference suffered, took a hiatus, then struggled on. The book includes only this straddle of a footnote: “Both the West Chester Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania and the Teaching Poetry Institute in California are (or were) closely associated with New Formalism.”
The Teaching Poetry Institute was short-lived and a casualty of Dana Gioia’s public service, but there is no mention of important New Formalist conferences in Colorado, Connecticut and New Hampshire that have filled gaps left by West Chester’s hiatus and changes.
In 1999 Alex Pepple founded the first online formal poetry journal, Able Muse. The Able Muse chat board, Eratosphere, mushroomed into the world’s largest online poetry workshop, and Pepple soon brought in as moderators such top formalists as the legendary personal & professional team of Timothy Murphy and Alan Sullivan, MacArthur “genius grant” winner A.E. Stallings, and core New Formalist R.S. Gwynn. Eratosphere cemented and expanded connections made at West Chester, and Pepple promoted many of its participants first in his journal, then later with books from his Able Muse Press.
Other gatherings of formalist poets thrived during this time period. The recently retired Wyatt Prunty brought lions of formalism (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Derek Walcott) each summer to the Sewanee Writers Conference where he and those lions mentored an impressive group of young formalists, including Erica Dawson, Greg Williamson and Juliana Gray; many of these young poets then went on to Johns Hopkins to study under formalist poets John Irwin, Mary Jo Salter, Brad Leithauser and David Yezzi.
[left: Rhina Espaillat] In Newburyport, Massachusetts the Dominican-American poet/translator Rhina Espaillat has led (formally, then spiritually) the Powow River Poets for almost three decades. Her poets, which include Bill Coyle, Midge Goldberg, Deborah Warren, Robert Crawford, Alfred Nicol and about twenty others, so dominated the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and the Richard Wilbur Award that unsuccessful contestants complained.
Transatlantic Connections glosses over or misses almost all of this history, and thus perpetuates musty stereotypes of postmodern academics. Pepple and Espaillat are immigrants and people of color. Women edit Measure Review and Light. The most significant American formal poets are non-academics, but this book spotlights academic poets.
The absence of a coherent historical narrative contributes to this book’s diffuse and superficial literary criticism. Despite these shortcomings and her reservations about Larkin, the author does provide examples of his pervasive influence on the most prominent New Formalists. She also makes a fair point when she argues that many New Formalists have internalized certain verbal tics of the Movement, particularly words that reflect mixed or tentative feelings. For the most part though, Transatlantic Connections will have value only when its extensive notes help future scholars of the Movement and New Formalism.
[Published on June 20, 2019 by Story Line Press. 262 pages, $16.95 paperback]