Formal verse also continued being written by American poets associated with the New Criticism, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate.
[3] As a result, it became more expected for poets to experiment and, with the rise of Confessional poetry, the writing and publication of non-autobiographical and non-Left wing verse became unfashionable.
As often happens in literature and the arts, however, what had begun as an anti-establishment counterculture seeking freedom from constraint hardened over time into an authoritarian literary elite which opposed innovation and expressed hostility to both older and younger poets who refused to conform to its dictates.
Although he or she invariably taught in a university, the poseurs would express profound hostility to the intellectual imagination, especially in the forms of science and technology, and a sentimental preference for nature over culture.
Gwynn wrote in similar terms about American poetry of the 1970s, "The tribal music of Poetryland -- the murky manifestos of Projective Verse and breath-units, the proliferation of cut-rate knock-offs of Howl and Daddy, the shamanism of the Deep Image and the multiform brain -- had begun to resemble ritualized incantations, mumbled by the multitudes of but comprehended by few, and a sense emerged that certain types of poetry had overstayed their welcome.
Meanwhile, aspiring Formalist poets from both the Silent and Baby Boomer Generations were still able to attend classes taught by older professors, including Yvor Winters, Robert Fitzgerald,[9] and Elizabeth Bishop, who continued to teach both literary criticism and the craft of writing poetry in a more traditional way.
[10] In a 2021 interview, Dana Gioia said that while New Formalism and New Narrative are the most controversial responses in American poetry to the Second Free Verse Revolution, they are only one facet of an enormous grassroots movement.
[13][14] One of the first rumbles of the conflict that was to provide the impetus to create New Formalism as a specific movement, came with the publication in 1977 of an issue of the Mississippi Review called 'Freedom and Form: American Poets Respond'.
The late 1970s saw the publication of a few collections by poets working in traditional forms, including Comforting the Wilderness (1977) by Robert B. Shaw, Room for Error (1978) by Charles Martin, and Timothy Steele's Uncertainties and Rest (1979).
From 1983 the onset of "neoformalism" was noted in the annual poetry roundups in the yearbooks of The Dictionary of Literary Biography,[15] and through the mid-1980s heated debates on the topic of formalism were carried on in several journals.
[16] 1986 saw the publication of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse and the anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms.
[17] As the pioneers of the movement were joined in print by a growing number other young formalist poets, the dispute that had begun in the 1920s and 1950s reignited and would later be dubbed the Poetry Wars by literary critics and historians.
[19] The term 'New Formalism' was first used by Ariel Dawson in the article "The Yuppie Poet" in the May 1985 issue of the AWP Newsletter,[20] which was a polemic against returning to traditional poetic forms.
Dawson's article accused the New Formalist poets not only of social conservatism, but also of yuppie capitalism, consumerism, and greed;[21] an allegation that would be repeated many times in the future.
[23] In 1986, Diane Wakoski, a deep image poet, literary critic, and professor at Michigan State University, published the essay The New Conservatism in American Poetry.
[24] The essay was provoked when Wakoski attended a Modern Language Association conference in which old Formalist John Hollander spoke critically, according to Robert McPhillips, of college and university "creative writing programs and the general slackness of most free verse.
[14] According to Gerry Cambridge, "This attack generated five responses, from Robert Mezey, Lewis Turco, David Radavich, Brian Richards, and Dana Gioia.
Most of them denied any necessary link between aesthetic and politics, in particular between form and conservatism, citing Ezra Pound as an example of a Fascist who wrote free verse.
They also criticized as a kind of cultural fascism Wakoski's intolerance of literary pluralism, paradoxically in the guise of a democratic Whitmanism that declared form to be un-American.
[31] New Formalist and New Narrative poets, on the other hand, were stereotyped as old money White Anglo-Saxon Protestant preppies and as Anglophiles filled with hatred of the American Revolution and nostalgia for the British Empire.
[40] Dick Davis, a Persophile, University-trained Iranologist, and award-winning translator of Persian poetry,[41] and Agha Shahid Ali, a Qizilbash Kashmiri Shiite Muslim and composer of Ghazals in American English,[42] are also considered to be New Formalists.
Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat, Mary Oliver's Rules of the Dance, and Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled are other examples of this trend.