A History of American Literature

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Paterson or Notebook, as fragmented and bewildering as The Bridge or The Dream

Songs. Along with these and other experiments in this genre, though, it is also

possessed of a fierce energy, the animating conviction that there is still time to

choose between the apocalypse and the millennium. On the one hand, Merrill points

out, there is the danger of global destruction wrought by “ANIMAL SOULS,” the

passive victims of technology and their own destructive impulses. On the other,

there is the opportunity of a new life, a paradise on earth springing from the

liberation of the imaginative intelligence and its discovery of a redemptive fiction.

“Stevens imagined the imagination / And God are one,” Merrill observes: “the

imagination, also / As that which presses back, in parlous times / Against ‘the pressure

of reality.’ ” Merrill was clearly in agreement with this: the words and artifacts

fashioned by feeling were for him, as for so many other American writers, an access

to a saving knowledge of our predicament. They are as necessary, he implies, as

breath and bread; and in this sense the true opposite of poetry is not prose or science,

but annihilation.

Redefining American poetry: The New Formalists

In a culture that tends to define itself in terms of freedom, perhaps none are more

rebellious than those who argue for rule; and in a poetic tradition in which the

poetic orthodoxy is free verse, it may be that the formalists are the radicals. At least,

that was what a loosely affiliated group of poets called the New Formalists, who

emerged in the 1980s, felt. For them, perfect freedom is to be found in service to

fixed meter, creativity is released by constraint. Reacting against the perceived

dominance of the autobiographical free verse lyric since the 1960s, the New Formalists

argued for a radical expansion of the forms and techniques available to poetry and

insisted that such an expansion would serve to popularize poetry, increasing its

audience with a general public that still believed that poetry should be regular and

rhyme. Sometimes called “Expansive” poets because of this commitment to the

expansion of form and readership, sometimes associated with the New Narrative

poets who (as their name suggests) wrote often book-length poems that told stories,

the New Formalists complained that the almost exclusive attention to free verse and

the autobiographical in creative writing classes not only limited the range of styles

available to emerging poets. By jettisoning prosody and privileging the confessional,

it made it impossible to establish clear literary standards. As one prominent

New Formalist poet, Brad Leithauser (1953–), put it in his essay “Metrical Illiteracy”

(1983), poetry training that gave priority to the personal voice rather than the

listening ear left few criteria by which to judge poems other than apt personal expres-

sion. Another major New Formalist, Dana Gioia (1950–), was more brutal: “this lack

of training,” he wrote in 1987, “makes young poets deaf to their own ineptitude.”

The New Formalists have often been fond of emphasizing their status as outsiders;

a seminal anthology of their work, published in 1996, was titled Rebel Angels. But

they have also been willing to acknowledge their antecedents, such as, from the

previous generation, Richard Wilbur, and from before him, Edwin Arlington

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