Very well-thought-out contribution to the formalism debate from Tim Yu. I agree with much of what he says; but a problem, it seems to me, with much of the debate is that individual practice will always outrun general critical frameworks.

An assumption behind Tim's assessment is that formal verse (sonnet for example) is always an expression of high culture, high seriousness - thus the main effect of Lowell's work is seen as the ironic juxtaposition of low contemporary squalor & the exalted old forms which can no longer contain or express it. But individual poets use form in poetry - from its most basic elements to its most highly-articulated specific types - in ways that are extremely unpredictable. As Jonathan pointed out, Frost, for example, can interpolate colloquial speech into strict forms without any appearance of straining after meter. Modernists might claim that his project - to democratize & "Americanize" forms - to make them popular and relevant in a way parallel to the project of Keats & Wordsworth a century before - failed. Yet Pound's "historical consciousness" (in Tim's sense), and the free verse that followed, has proved to be quite dated as well. What I'm trying to get at is that there simply is no particular "right" way to use or not use traditional forms. And it is impossible simply to consign them to the pile of obsolete machinery, because the present and future use to which they may be put is unpredictable.