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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i don't know much about formalism in the visual arts, but in poetry, formalists are the definition of wankery--conservative fools who relish in every verbal curlicue they utter, while meaning little or nothing of importance.
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who do you mean by formalists in poetry?
there are a number of different schools.
the russians, for example, are by and large fantastic. i'm not sure we are thinking of the same formalists, as the formalists were a very, very progressive group, demonstrating that poetry does not always have to "BE ABOUT" but it can be "MADE OF". they were some of the first writers to actively deconstruct the lyric and to have preoccupations with LANGUAGE. this move is to a certain extent mirrored in painting, with the emergence of abstract painting. in abstract art the subject is the paint itself, and the russian formalists thought along these lines, i.e. the WORDS themselves are the important tools in poetry, and so they sought to analyse them using sound-based techniques as well as exploring the ideas of collisions of meaning (though this came later).