Reviewed by William Gonch, Ph.D.

Many poets think of the 20th century as the era of “free verse,” which eschews traditional rhyme, meter, and verse form. Undoubtedly, great poets such as T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams wrote free verse; by mid-century it was the dominant style in American poetry. Polemicists in the 1960s accused traditional verse forms of being elitist, reactionary, and out of date. But formal verse never disappeared. Major modernists used it; poets such as Richard Wilbur and W.H. Auden kept it alive when it was unpopular; and in the late 20th century, a group of poets began to revive traditional forms under the title of the “New Formalism.”

New formalists wrote in old forms such as sonnets, ballads, rhyming couplets, and blank verse, a style of poetry that uses iambic pentameter without rhyme (this is the verse form of Paradise Lost and much of Shakespeare’s dialogue). They argued that old forms were not exhausted—in fact, the long neglect of traditional forms meant that a poet could achieve striking effects by combining old forms with contemporary language. The new formalists are still a minority, but they made their mark: today, traditional verse forms have a rich community of practitioners.

James Matthew Wilson is a contemporary poet in mid-career and a member of the second generation of new formalists. His work makes a strong case that traditional verse forms can still be used to write thoughtful, moving poetry. His most recent collection of poetry, The Strangeness of the Good, assembles several dozen lyric poems from the 2010s and early 2020; the second half of the book, his “Quarantine Notebook,” is a series of blank verse poems about the first two months of the coronavirus pandemic. These poems show that traditional forms endure because each one enables a poet to observe and create in irreplaceable ways.

One of my favorite poems in the collection, a sonnet entitled “The Teachers,” could only have been written as a sonnet. The poem is about the first years of childhood, during which a child learns elemental realities that anticipate what he will feel and do as he grows. His “father’s rough hands, hung with fingers laced,” teach him “all the eye may ever learn of prayer.” He learns to feel comfort in the dark by listening to his mother sing. But then he goes to sleep, and “every wildness of our fallen state / Come crying” in nightmares that are as raw as anything he will suffer as an adult. At the turn from the first eight lines—a unit known as the Octave in a sonnet—to the second part, or “sestet,” the attention shifts to nature as the child’s teacher. The “flit of time instructs the mind,” and his observation of things growing, maturing, and dying, instructs him about the fate of all living things.

In a Shakespearean sonnet like this one, the final two lines form a rhyming couplet that condenses the entire poem, expresses its argument in a tight form, and twists it to provide a new insight. Wilson is a master of resonant final lines like these: “These figures can so make the conscience ring / That speech, which follows, seems a poor, dumb thing.” The raw images of the child, afraid of nightmares and learning about death, “so make the conscience ring” that neither the child nor the poet will ever muster words equal to the experience. But it is no tragedy that language is insufficient to experience, because experience is common to us all. The shortcomings of language send us back to the opening lines to receive an eloquence that anyone can practice. The father’s hands are a more eloquent prayer than any words; the mother sings, but the “figure” of a mother singing reaches an elemental experience of comfort beyond words.

When the child matures, his actions and worries are more sophisticated versions of his childhood wants and comforts. His fear of losing love or a job is already anticipated by his childhood fear of the dark. Sophisticated adult language might be valuable, but it cannot say everything that is said by his silent father, folding his rough hands in prayer. In another poem, Wilson’s speaker thinks of Polish immigrant girls in the Midwest, his mother among them, who turned to manners and needlework in order to work through their emotions: their “want, pain, fear, deep longing / Worked themselves out in thread.” The speaker, a poet, sees his poetry as an extension of his mother’s work darning socks and teaching manners: “such silent passions…can—if just—be wrought,” in language as much as in housework.

By embracing the continuity between poetry and ordinary life, Wilson sets himself against a powerful strain in 20th century poetry. The dominant 20th century aesthetic was oppositional. Tradition and repetition were seen as worn out, oppressive, and probably a cover for capitalist exploitation. Poetry could overturn traditions and overturn the world by looking carefully and freshly at things long since overlooked—the everyday speech of ordinary people; habits of life like Ezra Pound’s passengers on the metro; manufactured objects like William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow; and even poetry itself, the ways in which our language makes meaning. When it is written well, modernist poetry shows us how much there is to notice all around us and lets us see the world freshly. But revolutionary modernism was also dogmatic and small-minded. It assumed that, if we renewed our vision, we would always reveal the emptiness of ordinary work and family life. Poetry like Wilson’s agrees with the modernists in aiming to refresh our vision of the world. But it rejects the assumption that if we see the world new, we will reject the old order. Against the modernist idea of the poet as a lonely visionary, Wilson sees poetry as a continuation of his family’s ordinary work, love, suffering, and prayer.

Wilson’s poetry, like a lot of New Formalism, argues with its cultural moment and its free-verse precursors. The New Formalists began as a young movement who opposed poetic hegemony, and even today they are an insurgent minority within the poetry establishment. Often, they are cheeky. Like the many college students who begin attending the Latin Mass, they get to embrace tradition but still have the fun of defying the establishment. Dana Gioia, one of the most accomplished New Formalists, put it this way: “The new formalists put free verse poets in the ironic and unprepared position of being the status quo. Free verse, the creation of an older literary rebellion, is now the long-established, ruling orthodoxy; formal poetry the unexpected challenge.”

Wilson draws on poetic forms themselves to argue against self-expression and on behalf of shared experience. “Imitation,” from this collection, is written in four-line ballad stanzas. It is the same stanzaic structure as the greatest of all Victorian poems, Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Like Tennyson’s poem, too, the poem is about the meaning of death. But Wilson’s poem is an argument against a modernist account of human experience. “Not long ago,” the poem starts, “it seemed the fashion / to preach that man was born alone / And died that way, in somber tone, / As if no one could know one’s passion.” These lines evoke an existentialist account of human dignity. Each human being, so the thinking went, is fundamentally alone. Our lives are incommunicable and meaningless, but we acquire a certain dignity by accepting our freedom to determine our own values. Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this mentality well when he wrote, “Man is condemned to be free.”

But Wilson ironizes nihilism by placing it in the past: the meaninglessness of human life was a “fashion,” not the self-evident truth that it seemed in the Paris of Sartre and Albert Camus. Certainly, our “thought” can be “Trapped at an airless altitude” by our loneliness… but are our lives really as incommunicable as the existentialists made out? “The infant in his mother’s lap,” he points out, “Already imitates her tap / Of heart, her self himself composing.” The child imitates the mother before he has words for self or mother. The line break between “her tap / Of heart” gives these lines two meanings. The infant intuitively takes on his mother’s habits, like the way she taps on the arm of a chair. He also takes on “her tap of heart”—the rhythm of her heartbeat and the pattern of her inmost thoughts and feelings. Our deepest selves, where Sartre found our purest freedom, are learned—and, therefore, can be told and understood.

Wilson is a devout Catholic, and it is in this sense of the continuity of human experience that the poems are at their most Catholic, because a distinctive mark of the Catholic Church is its insistence on the continuity of the faithful. Ancient paganism tended to divide into the religion of the masses, who burned incense to their household gods, and the beliefs of the philosophers, who pursued an intellectual apprehension of the One. By contrast, the Catholic Church insists that the doctrines of the faith are shared by all. Thomas Aquinas understood the work of the Redemption with greater sophistication than a peasant in 13th-century France, but they believe the same faith and the same Lord saves them. Wilson’s poetry extends this principle: poetry is a particular human practice that taps into a wisdom accessible to anyone who lives, observes, and prays. And the best case for a poetic form is that it makes that wisdom present.

TITLE IMAGE: Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Lord Thy Will Be Done, 1855.