Arguments Against Formalism

SUMMARY:

I would simply argue that poets are people who have spent a lot of time thinking about the relationships between words and things; they have thought about language and its applications and directions. In Of Modern Poetry Wallace Stevens, though he seems to have stayed out of the political arguments of his time in any explicit way, addressed the poets mandate. In other words, poets cannot simply choose to separate themselves from the life of their times. While poetry often addresses political issues, it would nevertheless be wrong to suggest that all, or even most, important poems over the centuries have had anything overtly political about them. Especially in times of war times such as we find ourselves in today poets have spoken up boldly.

What one encounters in the poem the soldier choking to death in a gas attack, exhibited by Owen to shock some sentimental and ignorant stay at home friend is so compelling and modern that it 's easy to overlook the poems non modern form.

Formalism
What one encounters in the poem the soldier choking to death in a gas attack, exhibited by Owen to shock some sentimental and ignorant stay at home friend is so compelling and modern that it 's easy to overlook the poems non modern form.
Owen writes it not in any novel style as a correlative of the novel message but in quite standard iambic pentameter lines arranged in formal quatrains.
Owen seems to eschew bolder modernisms because he wants desperately to communicate not his technical cleverness but his point, and he knew he had to reach that well bred literary audience he wanted to shock into a new understanding.
These readers respected the appearance of order in poetry, and to convey news of disorder and scandal, be had to remain within a formal technique bespeaking traditional ideas of