I realize that google is my friend, so to speak. I was just giving you a chance to flesh out your ideas about formalism and suggest what you might consider to be good examples of it.
Barring that, at some point, I will of course do my own research and reading ... which I would have done anyway.
This will, however, happen at some vague, undetermined time since other explorations have intervened since I wrote my request.
See you later,
ananda
p.s. -- OK, I have to say that the politico-economic side of lit crit really bothers me. However, it has caused me to think better about art as art, what draws me to a poem and basically, what makes a poem poetic.
This means that I will stop blaming any one specific poet or critic for the failure of some modern poetry to appeal to me poetically. In fact, it's quite possible that the American proclivity for "irreverence" and disrespect for high poetic art and its potentials, might be the root of the problem for me. But obviously, and hopefully, there has been some resistance to this in the interests of moving poetry along creatively. Fortunately, this means that I can now read some of the moderns that I might have avoided before: Guy Davenport, W H Auden, David Jones, and hopefully, the Americans you listed as formalist. We'll see. Sometimes it's just hard to ignore the poltics that I despise, but I have managed to study and appreciate Eliot, while despising his pretentious aristocratic affectation and politics; so maybe there's hope for me yet in coming to terms with art separate from the personality or political affiliation of the artist. We'll see.
What happened is that the Romantics spoiled me, especially Shelley. I just love their politics, that love for humanity, their revolutionary spirit and hope for an egalitarian, even anarchic, utopia. So their poetry speaks to me in a big way. And this was just the kind of poetry that Pound was so vitriolic against. Coming to terms with that is what made me so antagonistic to Pound and his poetics, even though I am in complete agreement that the power of the language is in the image.
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