Abstract

Over the last two decades, the application of critical theories to the study of literature has known a plethora of diverse methodologies and perspectives: some have kept loyal to the twentieth-century theories, others have departed from them, and some others have sought to build on them and come up with practicable tools of criticism that would maintain a minimal share of theorizing while evading outright commitment to the philosophical or epistemic underpinnings of theories. Among these methodologies is New Formalism, which has not hitherto been widely used and recognized among literary critics and practitioners. The present article gestures toward using New Formalism as a method of literary criticism, not so much by engaging with its cognizant theoretical discussions as by practically demonstrating how its analytical paradigms and strategies can be very useful for analyzing poetic texts such as Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” To this end, I have used a research methodology that thematizes literary form by showing how the “renewed” close reading strategy of New Formalism can reveal the cultural meanings embedded in form. These meanings would pass unnoticed if analysis focused exclusively on content and failed to treat the poem’s formal elements as historically meaningful signifiers.