FORM (again!) on Tom Eyers and Speculative Formalism

FORM with reference to Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017)

This post follows on from the speculations on form, after my reading of Caroline Levine’s On Forms: Pages: From My Journal: On Form (again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms

 

6^th February 2026

I’ve returned again to look at Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism. Yesterday I worked through the introduction, reading each sentence out loud and summarising or even translating terms into those which I could understand. Additionally, I decided to avoid, quite deliberately, his frequent allusions to philosophy and his side swipes at other kinds of approaches to literature, which he will critique later in the book. Let’s keep it focussed.

He opens with a bold claim: ‘This book proposes a new theory of literary form and’  - and I think I have paid less attention to the next word – : ‘formalisation’. (1) A word to which we shall return. He offers a theory for how literature works. Mimesis is rejected, as is the ‘over-running’ – his word – of form by context (he later calls these the ‘outsides’). Text breaks free from those bonds between form and world and – being very crude about it – re-form in a different way, a way which gives some power to the formal, indeed renders it a ‘speculative’ instrument. This power stops the texts being written back into their occasions, into their materials, into content. (It is perhaps impossible to avoid that word, though Eyers does). But whereas someone like Adorno might see this as ‘the critical function of the work of art’, and that's how I've read it in The Meaning of Form, Eyers sees it resulting in an impasse, a blockage. This will become important for his later argument.

This blockage will enable a different kind of relationship between the text and the external world. (This clearly rejects all kinds of formalism or negative views of formalism that suggest the text is sealed hermetically from the world.) Indeed, he suggests that this incompletion is ultimately useful in connecting with the outsides, and he posits the existence of a ‘non mimetic reference’, a new connection, opening up new creativity.

The productivity of impasse is absolutely central to his argument.

We’re back to formalisation. It is presented as a synonym of ‘categorization’ at one point. Again, he argues that this formalism does not lead just to self-reference or self-reflexive introspection or insularity (‘formalism’ in a bad sense). These ‘gaps’, this ‘impasse’, this ‘dehiscence’, to use some of the terms that he uses, impede direct access but ‘open the path to a different kind of reference’. (2) He makes it clear that these impasses occur in a number of places outside of the literary work too, whenever we try to categorise or catalogue or formalise, well…  nearly anything, really. This isn't represented as a negative aspect of form and formalisation, but as a positive, and indeed Eyers allows himself to refer to this new approach as opening to ‘pastures new’. (3) This feels momentarily almost utopian in this productivity. There is a negative, for me, or a problem, or at least the presence of a different kind of resistance, when he says: ‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable; rather, they are always routed through and transformed by the more particular texts that are put in their service and that may come to resist or deny them in turn.’ (3) This suggests there could be no general theory, no apparatus equivalent to that of Derek Attridge’s clearcut structures of form, as in The Singularity of Literature. Or as in Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s theory of poetic artifice.

This account of form is linked to formalisation (or categorisation) as much as Levine’s sense of form (which Eyers critiques) is linked, or held to be analogous to, social forms and formations. Why can’t we just talk about literary form? I want to ask at this point, but I’m following Eyers as closely as I can. ‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable,’ is telling me, to some extent, there can be no ‘talk about form’; there can only be talk about form, formulations, the powerful impasses of literary texts, only with reference to particular literary texts, for (I’m guessing) they exert their productivity in individual ways: hence, one might say, the many investigations of the book. Will Montgomery in his even more text-focussed study Short Form American Poetry (where I first came across Eyers) calls the impasses ‘generative opacity’ (3), which I think might be a better term (for me) for the blocks that form throws up to re-divert our perceptiveness. Though that is, for a moment, to accept Eyers at his word, as it were.  

                                                                                                                                                             

There is some categorical stability, though, when Eyers identifies two kinds of incompletion or opacity. The first is in literary language. The second is in the ‘outsides’ of literature, which I found easiest to concretize as ‘history’, but others may prefer to use the word ‘contexts’. Both defeat mimesis, but that is not (as is clear from what has been looked at before) the end of the story, but its beginning. Both of these areas share their limitations to totalisation. ‘Speculative’ formalism wouldn’t in the final analysis favour one or the other (or indeed concur to the division between the two, but this is an early stage of the argument. Remember: Eyers comes from a philosophic background.)

I feel I must stop here and take stock. I have, of course, read the whole book, but I am returning to the originating thoughts (the first section of the Introduction!) which I don’t think I understood at the beginning last time. Whether much of this (or any of it) would influence my attempt to develop my formalist thinking is unclear. Even less so in terms of writerly poetics.

7^th February 2026

 

Eyers’ use of the term ‘speculative’ is defended against assumptions that arise from the use of the term (philosophical baggage) which I shall pass over at this point in order to focus on his central points. One is that his work is influenced by Marxist attitudes to literature, secondly that his formalism avoids obsession with mimesis and with what he calls ‘interiority’, which could mean formal self-reflexivity, or it could mean a fixation on ‘interior’ states of selfhood. I suspect both are rejected (or resisted) in this way of thinking. Rejected (or resisted) in favour of production.

He is also in favour of critical theory. That would seem blindingly obvious, but the era of high theory is past, and he knows he will need to distinguish his formalism from other schools of theory (again, let us focus on his focus, or we will go astray). Those other schools have lessened the lessons of what he calls ‘the formativeness of form’ (5). (This term is not just used for notions of literary form, but for the ‘forming’ of other discourses too.)

The question to ask of literary form would be how it somewhat frees itself of determining histories and yet how it may reproduce those histories. That's almost a quote from Eyers. But does that mean he's moving on from thinking about impasses and outsides? I don’t think so. To turn away from form would mean not knowing what literature could achieve, produce or do, other than simply being or becoming a receptacle for history: content as the important element and form simply as something fixed and derivative, a power of secondary order, a container. (That’s how many people think of it, of course: formal kinky boots for the fetishized flesh of ‘content’. A tight fit.)

His answer to this problem is to divert briefly into deconstruction, which I want to leave to one side at this early stage of engagement with this: thinking about form acknowledges that paradox is important to these counter-intuitive ways of thinking. To avoid precisely the kinky boots theory of form. The first section (I’ve only reached page 6 of the Introduction) which I have been labouring through, ends with an informative plea that I will quote in its entirety. ‘Form, as it will be understood in what follows, becomes the conflicted, multiply distributed, and plastic site where truths specific to literature are rendered contingent but also given their only opening to the world, and from which other formal logics in other domains may be better understood. In other words, the truths that literature imparts should be more, not less, visible when its formal features are more comprehensively mapped.’ And presumably he means ‘mapped’ through engagement with the impasses, with the ‘generative opacities’ we find.

Or are there easier ways of talking about ‘the infection of content by form’? (28) Ways developed by other formalists (Wolfson and others) and by a more comprehensive theorist (Attridge again)? I.e., the methods I’ve adopted before? (See some of the links below.)

 

8^th February 2026

 

Oddly I’m typing these notes for the blog, rather than putting excerpts in my poetics journal. Perhaps that is because I can see quite clearly that the unfinished business of examining Eyers – I’ve been at this for over a year! – will perhaps not yield poetics, but it is equally clear that I am unlikely to use its thinking much in any future critical work. But others might find my incomplete notes (this is not a review of the book at all!) useful in some way, if only in diverting attention towards Attridge’s work (which Eyers mentions once) or others who ‘read for form’, Susan Wolfson and others, who are given short shrift here, unfairly, but not with too much opprobrium. Levine’s book is given generous space to be critiqued (and passages of his online review here, Tom Eyers – The Revenge of Form: Review of C. Levine’s “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network” – b2o: boundary 2 online, reappear in his Introduction. Other schools of literary theory and criticism are severely attacked: the digital humanities in their antipathy towards close reading, and versions of distant and surface reading that seem, I agree, to deny a role for FORM, which to me is unthinkable. New Historicism also, for its obvious re-focussing on the contexts of literature to ‘solve’ a text. (Of course, some of its discoveries are quite illuminating; certainly, a New Historical reading provided much for my versioning of Michael Drayton’s sonnets in Bad Idea.)

Deconstruction he engages with, more sympathetically, to push de Man’s thinking onwards to something like his own ‘position’ – as far as I’ve been able to understand it. One of the reasons it can’t be summarised neatly is that his theory is a contingent one: the contention that ‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable; rather, they are always routed through and transformed by the more particular texts that are put in their service and that may come to resist or deny them in turn.’ (3)  This suggests we will find a fuller representation in actual readings (close readings, we might say). Even in the introduction we find this passage on Wallace Stevens:

Steven’s verse evinces what I'm calling a speculative formalist interest in the simultaneous distance and proximity that the verse form, whether metered or free, forces upon its objects, such objects at the same time serving to distress poetic form from a topologically obscure ‘inside’ – even as … such objects are presupposed as externally opposed to the language that would, in an initial moment, seek to capture their inner essences. (31)

He calls this ‘the simultaneous recognition in Stevens of the formative and deformative potentialities of poetic language’ (31) but I still wonder whether this could be more clearly expressed. Whereas his statement that in language poetry ‘such formal logics will be shown to inhere in a back-and-forth between history and text that finally renders the distinction between the two porous, if not untenable’, rings true to my readerly experience. (31) 

As said, this is not a review of the book, but there is a good online one by Herman Rapaport

here on Postmodern Culture: Reviving Formalism in the 21st Century – POSTMODERN CULTURE. I’m not going to review a review, of course, but I have tracked his quotations from Eyers, in an attempt to do what he purportedly is not: offering some sort of general theory.

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Rapaport quotes the most generalisable sentence in the Introduction, which I quote above, but let’s revisit it to see if my discussion has rendered it more concrete: “Form [is] the conflicted, multiply distributed, and plastic site where truths specific to literature are rendered contingent but also given their only opening to the world, and from which other formal logics in other domains may be better understood.” (6). This seems – perhaps with the exclusion of the final clause – perfectly lucid.

The following contention seems to use Derek Attridge’s sense that a literary text formally ‘stages’ its content: “Literature stages better than most phenomena the manner in which, far from shutting down the possibility of meaning, the impossibility of any final, formal integration of a structure and its component parts is the very condition of possibility of that structure.” (8) 

This is, of course, a re-assertion of the “creative capacity of impasses” (8), which we have encountered before, but in a more deconstructive mode.

Therefore, it is worth being reminded: “central to my argument will be the claim that form resists meaning as much as it enables it” (9).

The work of Francis Ponge is described in ways that demonstrate the existence of such impasses and blockages, for “in the formal paradoxes of his poetry the inability of language to latch neatly onto the object-world” is legion. (29) This reads Ponge against a lot of other representations, of course.

‘It is in poetry’s determinative inability to present the whole, an inability written into the very productive constraints exemplified in poetry by the marshaling of language into meter, that it gains momentary access to the similar failures of completion and rational totalization that define its referents, referents otherwise assumed to lie submissive in anticipation of poetic representation; Stevens, needless to say, instantiates for us this paradox better than most.’ (101) Wallace Stevens, again, is the philosopher’s friend.

On the new reference that form affords: “Its very resistance to semantic recuperation that, paradoxically enough, lies at the root of literature’s capacity to refer, even to transfigure, annul, boost or remain strikingly indifferent to, its historical and political conditions.” (9–10). 

Qualifications of the ‘outsides’, or of one of them: “History is not to be conceived of as ‘context’ per se, as an externality ranged dynamically against the passive content that it molds; rather, literary history and politics are especially vivid folds in literary form as such, envelopes that both determine and are determined by the textual or conceptual scientific structures that too often are assumed to be their mere passive products.” (10)

In Ron Silliman’s “Albany”: ‘History appears here as another formal logic, at the moment at which an agent, whether linked to collective political action, to sexual violence, to ethnic classification, both appears and is effaced by the temporal movement of the verse’s underlying structure, by the inevitability of the end of one sentence and the beginning of another; temporality, that is, gives out onto signs of historical events, only for history to succumb to the temporal once more, in a movement of repetition that is also defined by the power of retrospective assimilation, neutralization, and erasure.’ (159)

Reading this, as you probably are, without benefit of either Silliman’s text, or Eyers’ subtle and fulsome reading, this is rather opaque. But, read in context, this is an astute summary of this particular Silliman ‘new sentence’ work, and such readings give weight to the notion that that ‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable; rather, they are always routed through and transformed by the more particular texts that are put in their service and that may come to resist or deny them in turn.’ (3) One such text is ‘Albany’ by Ron Silliman. You can’t look at form, except through forms, and in acts of forming (which means the processes of making and the processes of (close) reading).

   

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This post refers, in its way, to others. Initially, the thesis of my 2016 book The Meaning of Form, is expounded here:  here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks).

There are some updates on my encounters with Derek Attridge’s thinking here:  Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature.

I tangle with, tango with, Adorno’s aesthetics here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry, as I do in The Meaning of Form.

BUT the immediate predecessor of this post is:  

Pages: From My Journal: On Form (again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms

Other workings around notions of form may be found in my book The Necessity of Poetics: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. The images on this page are formal re-workings of a painting by Patricia Farrell to form the cover image of the book. They seem appropriate.

From My Journal: On Form (again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms

From My Journal: On Form and Caroline Levine’s Forms 

I have been partly re-tracing the theoretical steps that led towards, into, and out beyond the writing of my book The Meaning of Form (as I call it, though the title continues with the keywording essential to modern scholarship) in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave 2016). I bought a copy of Caroline Levine’s Forms (Princeton 2015) and hoped it would provide further thoughts. It did, but not quite in the way I’d expected, or hoped. This is not a review of the book, which I have utilised for a different (related) purpose. In some ways I don’t get beyond the first fence, and keep falling over it again and again. Before I get to Levine, though, I mulled over a few exemplary passages in Derek Attridge’s work (principally) that I’d missed in The Meaning of Form and in The Poetry of Saying, and perhaps in ‘Pulse’. Some, of course, were published after the completion of those works. 

1st November 2024 from Doctor Zhivago:... ‘That art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing’. (p.406)

8th November 2024: Derek Attridge, Singularity of Literature:... ‘The formally innovative work, the one that most estranges itself from its reader, makes the most sharply challenging (which is not to say the most profound) ethical demand. Formal innovation (of this sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experiment.’ And it goes on pp. 130-31.

I seem to have missed this useful passage which suggests a better term (which I have used before) than ‘linguistically’ innovative, and (more importantly) this passage is the link between The Poetry of Saying (LUP, 2005) and The Meaning of Form. [And sounds a minatory note!]

10th November 2024: I read Attridge’s description of two ways of reading, and thought: that's the distinction between the said of the saying (‘turning the event into an object’ and ‘to preserve the event as an event’). I looked at the footnote. Attridge calls it Levinas’ ‘related distinction’. Another missing link, on p. 40 of J.M. Coetzee…

21st November 2024: ‘autrebiography,’ I now see, I took from Coetzee, from Attridge’s book on same [and used it as a description/subtitle of my autobiographical book Words Out of Time].

24th November 2024: ‘I would also include [under ‘form’] the meanings of the words and sentences, for once we conceive of the work as an event, meaning becomes an occurrence, not a substance or abstraction. Meanings unfold, intertwine, fade, echo, clash... What is called “form” is one aspect of this moving complex, inseparable from what is traditionally called “content”.’

This seems succinct, more so, than other explanations by Derek Attridge. In this case from page 29 of Moving Words.

‘Some literary theorists’ –  I’m not one of those, but I could be implicated here [Attridge did witness and question my 1999 paper on Levinas and Tom Raworth at Salford, later to appear in When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry] – ‘have tried to employ Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said to argue for the non-conceptual, event-like nature of the artwork – something of a distortion of Levinas’s thought, but useful in itself.’ (The Work of Literature p. 89.)

‘The feelings that form part of the peculiarly literary response are not direct responses to content, but are always mediated by form: they are coloured by the pleasure we take in the representation itself, in the language whereby the emotional response is invited. (The Work of Literature p.85)

December 23rd 2024: Reading Creeley’s The Finger at The Handyman yesterday afternoon: ‘Here forms have possibility.’ p 63.

 

January the 5th 2025: I've been reading Forms and I’m not happy with Caroline Levine’s leap from – first – ‘form’ to ‘forms’ without a sense of what/who does the forming, and then not happy with – second – her leap (of faith?) from ‘forms’ to ‘social formations’, which she claims share the same properties. I'm unconvinced so far.

Also her sense of ‘form’ as relating to wholes (although I do like her sense of the collision of ‘forms’ in social interaction; she's good on that). But what about forms that don't behave in this way?

For example, in Carruthers’ Stave Sightings we find this about Joan Retallack’s 5uite: ‘If it is formalist ... it enters into form with contingency, boldly uncertain about form and inquiring of new critical and textual formations.’ p.129

 January 6th 2025: Levine does not, quite, make an equation between aesthetic and social ‘forms’. I’m fine with her saying ‘a new formalism will have to take account of the temporal patterns of art and life as organising and shaping, yes, but also as plural and colliding, jumbled and constantly altered.’ p .81 She allows for the loosening of what I thought was a tight analogy. ‘Forms do organise us, but on a daily basis we are organised at once by multiple social, political biological, and aesthetic rhythms, each imposing a different order and following a different logic. They do not work together [my emphasis], and so in the end are not able to impose a single coherent order on experience.’ p. 80-81.

But in the beginning of the argument, they do work together, when there is still the jump from an account of form/s that doesn’t take account of the processes of forming in the readily act/event as posited by Attridge, so it still offers an analogy between all forms.

I must say I approve of her account of social forms, of dealing with conflicting ‘institutions’ that collide and re-form in various ways. What that has to do with enjambement in Robert Creeley really isn't clear (she rejects what she says the ‘new formalism’ does which is to suggest fractured form = fractured society, though her reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is near to this, though redeemed by her conclusion as quoted above).

(She confuses ‘rhythm’ with ‘metre’. Don’t they all? See ‘Pulse’.)

I’m being promised to be shown ‘how unlike forms encounter one another’, on page 93, so perhaps I'll read more before accounting for her argument any further.

Gender, we’re told, ‘is more like a literary form’. p. 94. It’s that ‘like’!

January 7th 2025: I’m asking for a smaller but deeper account of ‘form’, more or less that of Attridge which is not – note – the formalism of the new formalists. The theory is very good (I’ve already realised how her chapter ‘Network’ provides some focus for talking about Twentieth Century Blues, which I had to (I’ve been up making notes this morning) [This was for the Jerome Rothenberg celebration at which I introduced and read a poetics piece about that particularly networky poem.]). But, suddenly, in the final chapter we find reference to ‘formalist cultural studies’ p. 132 (already a contradiction in terms) and remarks like ‘it is constructed and stylized, and it is hardly free of ideology or narrative artifice.’ p. 133 That’s FORM, as I understand it: limited but deep (which is not to negate social forms, but are they the same? Even Levine says they’re not, however ‘like’ they are). The form she does look at – in that final chapter – is the much maligned, overlooked form: plot, which she relates (as how could you not?) to social forms. (And she does use Russian Formalist terms at one point!) What about ‘construction’ or ‘stylization’? Whatever the case, I expect an excellent reading (of The Wire which I saw some episodes of, partially).

If, in networking, ‘kinship is not the same as the city streets’ p. 144, then surely racism is not the same – or even like – metre?

For Levine, ‘Knowing Forms’ (p. 147-50) means ‘social forms’. And her readings, particularly of Bleak House and The Wire are brilliant. It’s just that the use of ‘form’ or more often ‘forms’ doesn't allow for real plasticity, for ‘forming’. Indeed her sense of the ‘crisscrossing forms that produce social experience’ p.148 is a.) excellent, and b.) more flexible than her ‘formalist’ (in my sense) readings. She rushes to the social, realises (to quote Jagoda) that ‘Every political ecology... is a precarious, tottering structure’ p. 148 of ‘the unexpected effects of clashes among wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks’ p.149 and leave form and forming behind in forms and formations.

18th May 2025: Back to Levine, after having used her chapter ‘Network’ for my description of the forms and forming of Twentieth Century Blues for my Glasgow lecture, and back to her preface, to find the point where she originally collects an area of critical attention for herself in the ‘organisations and arrangements which were the main means by which power worked: politics was a matter of imposing order on the world’. p. x She then adds, ‘It never occurred to me not to call these ordering principles forms,’ p. x, though she confesses ‘It took me a long while to realise that this use of the term was not intuitive to other literary critics,’ – indeed! –‘who typically equated form with genre, also form as an exclusive domain of aesthetics.’ p. xi. The simplifying notion of ‘equating’, the narrowing of ‘exclusive’, the blunt use of ‘genre’, and the suggestion of rarified specialisation in ‘aesthetics’, leads one away from the notion of form-as-forming in the act-event of encounter, (to reduce Attridge to a few buzzwords). There are other ways of conceiving form, perhaps no less counter-intuitive than her own, for she equates form with societal forces which is my continual argument with her otherwise brilliant book, which, after a gap of some months, I am rereading.

(There is a parallel in her treatment of history. She opposes views that treasure the otherness of the past. I’m reminded of a half-forgotten quotation from Jerome McGann about how the alien perspectives of the past in a past work of art operate as kinds of critique on the present world. Levine’s view is that – crudely put – a feminist might be responding to past oppressions to learn lessons for the present. I actually favour both views: at different times in different ways either approach might yield insight. My recent readings and rewritings of Dante have furnished me with many a perspective so different from our common present day morality, the punishments of what William Empson calls the ‘torture monster’, for example, yet there are other times when it feels as though the punishment of a hypocrite, for example, makes perfect modern sense and one would wish for something of the justice dealt out across the cornices for our modern world. Both perspectives guard against one another in my resultant text of Stars.)

19th May 2025: When Levine puts it like this, I concur: ‘How should we understand the relationship between the literary and political forms?’ she asks, thus keeping the two distinct. And I agree that ‘I consider ways in which literary and social forms come into contact and affect one another, without presuming one is the ground or cause of the other,’ is a good strategy for avoiding a simplistic equation and false consequentiality between the two, which is helped by her awareness of the general instability of social organisations and disorganisations – but why they are called forms – amid a discussion of form – still eludes me. p. 22. An awareness of ‘the many different shapes and patterns that constitute political, cultural, and social experience’ seems exemplary. p. 17. ‘The interaction of forms’ seems a stronger and more useful focus than her focus on form itself. I should follow its arguments again but realise their detachment from where I am (starting (out) again).

 One of the first things I have done to re-engage with the tracking of form (and my sense that it engages with the social) was to read Will Montgomery’s Short Form American Poetry, which deals with familiar territory such as the work of Oppen and Creeley. (His first sentence is like the voice of the sirens to me: ‘This is a book about poetic form.’) I enjoyed the book, learnt a lot, but in the present context, I noted, in his introduction, references to – quotations from – Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism. (A sirenic title for me!) Googling threw up this interesting review of Levine’s book by Eyers himself: 

Tom Eyers – The Revenge of Form: Review of C. Levine’s “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network” – b2o: boundary 2 online

Pause to read it, here, perhaps, gentle reader.

What I have fumbled over, above, he glides over. I think the review is a dry-run for at least part of his introduction to the book Montgomery quotes from, Speculative Formalism, which I have on order, is somewhere in the post, and which I shall absorb, perhaps at leisure. (After all, this theoretical twitching is carried out between work as a poet.) But I do note that Eyers, in the review, questions Levine’s thesis, in more theoretically-astute ways than my own. ‘This apparent commensurability between literary and social forms’ – it’s that Faultline again – ‘may well be the result of a prior incommensurability, one that exists as a condition of possibility for the very distinctiveness of the forms in question, no matter how much they be said to intertwine all the way down… It is these latter, knotty, theoretical problems that the book under review doesn’t quite get to grips with, as deeply impressive as it otherwise is.’ Again: ‘how, precisely, one specific class of forms – literary forms – gain purchase on those other forms that jostle for attention?’

‘ “Forms are at work everywhere,” Levine declares, not quite an answer to that question, a declaration questioned by Eyers: ‘But hasn’t a crucial question been elided here? Even as Levine celebrates the ‘dissolving’ of the barrier between text and context, she presumably wouldn’t wish to claim that there is, as a result, absolutely no distinction to be made between the words that make up Brontë’s narrative, and the arrangements of space that are her referent. Presuming this much, we are still to learn how it is that these two very different things are to be explained according to the same, now highly capacious, perhaps too capacious, definition of ‘form’. Even more importantly, how do these different forms come to relate to one another at all? To use a now unfashionable parlance, what is the theory of reference that underpins Levine’s account?’

Is his answer to concentrate on form? we might ask. Yes and No. ‘The temptation to be avoided … is a retreat into form, the foregrounding of reassuringly abstract figures or techniques at the expense of political salience and social relevance. But equally troublesome would be the assumption that abstraction and formality are inherently apolitical and ahistorical.’ But a concentration on form, as the act-event of forming , need not retreat in this way, as Attridge is very clear to make out, and the thinking of Adorno, for one, which Eyers mentions, and which I attempt to use in the last chapter of The Meaning of Form, on the poetry of Barry McSweeney, is a powerful way of approaching history and form. And the theory of Veronica Forrest-Thomson always comes rushing back at such times.

For now, I must leave alone Eyers’ thinking. I am at the edge of knowing.

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I write about the related theses of The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of Form here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Poetry of Saying: The Point of Poetry: Ethics, Dialogue and Form, and here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks). There are some updates on my encounters with Attridge here:  Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature. I tangle with, tango with, Adorno’s aesthetics here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry

‘Pulse’ is to be found in my recent The Necessity of Poetics: here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!

 

My use of Levine’s ‘Network’ chapter partly resulted in this ‘Introduction’, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium. NOTE: My paper, may be read in full here: Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium | English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, from the online pages of English Studies of Latin America, January 2026.

My ‘Dante’ project Stars, is written about here: Pages: On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts. I didn’t abandon it, as the first posting of this piece suggested.