Issues Around Formality

Formality in serious art is one of the highest expressions of individuality known to the human race. Why it should be that form and formal rigor were misrepresented in twentieth century America— from the height of individuality into a snobbish, classicist ploy, which represented serious art as priggish, "Sunday School"— is because the twentieth century was essentially, to employ America as paradigmatic, a minor-leaning century, in which serious expressions of individuality were frowned upon in high sectors, both in America and in Western Europe. Earnest expressions of individuality were largely replaced with empty spectacles, and thus the degeneration of the century into a kind of school of quietude. A minor-leaning century, like the twentieth largely was, regards formality in serious art as one of the gravest threats to the hegemony of homogeneity and non-individuality; and the persecution of serious individuals is de rigueur. What part of me warms to discussing this, is that the minor-leaning twentieth century is now over, Great God Almighty! Now that high ideals around issues of formality (history, philosophy) in art, and serious artistic individuality, are back in circulation, and the lives of serious artists and those who appreciate serious art need not be macabre (serious art does not have to be humorless, either), we can put our crosses and garlic away and look at the issues around formality which are more intriguing.

My own approach to formality in poetry is a complex one. As of one hundred years ago, rhyme and rhyming poetry still dominated most poetry economies, both in the United States and Europe. That poetry should involve heightened language, what is commonly referred to as poetic diction, was not then in question. Century XX stripped things back so that by the turn of the century into the twenty-first, when I began to seriously publish, rhyme and rhyming poetry, and poetic diction with it, had been replaced by a hodge-podge of free verse or blank verse approaches (blank verse being unrhymed iambic pentameter, like Paradise Lost or Hyperion), and an ambitious poet was forced to make a kind, manner or form of music that would have been considered stunted from the 1920s and back. 

Noteworthy that journals, presses, and universities were all complicit in or with this heist. It was a shared effort, that in the United States met with little resistance. Why should there have been? Formal verse in America had done nothing to equal what had been accomplished with formal verse in Europe. The post-modern commonplace of "light" or "breezy" or "stop bravely at the surface" America, which originated mostly from New York, the media, and the South, was prohibitive for many who might otherwise be interested in advanced formality as a means of expression. 

Being a student of the Romantics and Milton, I chose to address these difficulties, which take formality in poetry and cheese-grate it, by using a technique I call "clustering"; building musical effects into poems without being obsequious to the convention of end-rhymes. On the other hand, when by 2018 I found myself publishing The Ballad of Robert Johnson, I felt that the time had arrived when hand-over-fist formality could again be accepted into English-language poetry, as both an expression of individuality and a rejection of what were still standardized poetry operations. Twentieth-century avant-gardism (and I do consider this ballad an adjunct to post-avant or the avant-garde, a gambit past Lang-Po into narrativity and Eros) was short on discussions of formal beauty in high art. 

"Beauty" itself, as a manifest aim in art, was mistrusted, and gamed against heavily— by post-modernity, multi-culturalism, and academic feminism. In a way and on a very salient level, this game travesties the entire endeavor of major high art consonance, which must include, as a component aspect, the idea that formal beauty ranks high on imperative spreadsheets, no matter what other avant-garde imperatives (to innovation, construction of new idea matrixes) may ride alongside it. The game against formal beauty guaranteed that, in the twentieth century, the likes of William Blake— a comparative novice/amateur, whose worth as a higher artist is contained in a philosophical imperative and visionary stance puerile next to Keats' Odal vision— could be given a higher ranking than Keats, who supersedes Blake at every point, both as formalist and philosophe.

Keats' prosody, his metrics, the formal beauty of his best poetry, is a political statement in and of itself, against society which would impinge on the individual, against individual-slandering authority as well. In a certain way and on a certain level, formal beauty in high art is the ultimate cultural statement of individuality and innovative power against authority, and an ultimate statement (also) of rebellion. By granting extreme non-homogeneity to the work, which inheres not just superficially but profoundly within the works' confines, and raises the work to a level at which history must be brought into focus by the works' grandiosity (and I do mean grandiosity against mere novelty, as mere novelty is one quagmire built into century XX avant-gardism), the work situates itself within its own transcendent mode of visualization/realization. Authority instantly cringes at having its vestments and privileges (of, for instance, reduction and dilution of the gifted individual) stripped from it. 

Century XX avant-gardism was very secretly invested in different forms of homogenization, up to and including complicity with authoritarian governments-- thus, its tendencies to de-emphasize, demean, and degrade formality and/or formal beauty, as transitive to something unique created from an atomized, individual consciousness. Furthermore, when theorists in the United States construct idea matrixes around, say, the English Romantics, the interrogation of "beauty" usually manifests a startling conclusion. "Beauty" is demeaned as a mode of traditionalism, conservatism, and the reactionary. Progressivism is made to fit a mold, third-world in nature, of a kind of cartoon, art transformed into a husk of anti-art imperatives, fulfilled by a nullification of the aesthetic. Whether they know it or not, post-modernists who endlessly reply, in only slightly different forms, Duchamp's urinal, give away their game easily. The game itself is, like not only Duchamp but the Dadaists, kill art, kill the artist. 

This sense— that twentieth century avant-gardism (manifest, past Modernity, up to the present moment in the States, in post-modernity, multi-culturalism, and academic feminism) was secretly a game against formality, and/or formal beauty, and thus posited against an important component element of serious art— is what makes it so easy to dispense with. By emptying art of anything artistic, both avant-gardists and centrists proved themselves to be non-artists. They, thus, might as well have been government clerics or bureaucratic scripters— they were there, in art spaces, for the wrong reasons. This century, a gauntlet has already been laid down against these minor-leaning structures, welcoming formality and/or formal beauty in high art back into the fold, understanding what put amateurism in place of giftedness and inverting things back to where they belong, for those engaged earnestly. This, I choose to call the Neo-Romantic (ushered in, on one literary side, by post-avant). Rebellion in century XX avant-gardism was faux-rebellion— more in cahoots with authoritarian impulses and destructive games than not— now, we stand ready to let our own, Neo-Romantic version of prosody, its masterful manifestation and enactment, dictate terms to us about how we may cultivate any extreme form/manner of artistic individuality against the rest of the world (art-world or otherwise) which is not us. We thus make a potent political statement that there is room, in American society, for individuals to stand against the masses. This enables the realization of beauty, from individual narratives of form and passion, to become an event of some consequence for the whole of society at large.