New Formalism is a late-twentieth and early twenty-first century movement in Anglo-American poetry that has brought about a major revival in metrical and rhymed verse. New Formalism differs from ‘old’ formalism only in name with the division being, strictly speaking, little more than chronological. For the most part, New Formalist verse is written after the early 1970s. Bust of Homer, one of the earliest European poets, in the British Museum Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... See: International System of Units, colloquially called the Metric System, and also metrication. ...
New Formalist poets may be divided into two waves. The first represents those born in the 1940s and 50s, the most notable of which are Dana Gioia, Sam Gwynn, Mark Jarman, and Timothy Steele. The second represents those born in the 1960s and 70s, the most notable of which are A.E. Stallings, Greg Williamson, Jennifer Reeser, and Leo Yankevich. Michael Dana Gioia (born December 24, 1950) is an American poet who quit his successful career as a corporate executive to write. ... One of the leading poets of the New Formalist movement, Leo Yankevich is the author of five books of poetry, the first four of which are represented in The Unfinished Crusade: New and Selected Poems, published in 2000 by The Mandrake Press, Mill Valley, Cailfornia. ...
New historicists, like formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history.
In this respect, the new historicism is not "new"; the majority of critics between 1920 and 1950 focused on a work’s historical content and based their interpretations on the interplay between the text and historical contexts (such as the author’s life or intentions in writing the work).
New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was—rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was.
For this reason and another more, Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding, self-contained object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its parts (allusions, images, rhythms, sounds, etc.).
They reject the formalist view that a work of literary art is demonstrably unified from beginning to end, in one certain way, or that it is organized around a single center that ultimately can be identified.
Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they find in a given text, arguing that every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary function.
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