Modernism has always had a strange relationship to formalism, at least in English departments—which is where a lot of strange relationships get started. Part of the problem was timing. When aging Anglo-American modernists started winning Nobel Prizes after World War II—T. S. Eliot in 1948, William Faulkner in 1949, Ernest Hemingway in 1954—the ideas and practices of New Criticism were flourishing. Since Eliot himself was central to both these cultural configurations, it probably made sense to think that because so much early twentieth-century literature was committed to formal experiment, it must be naturally aligned with the work of critics who were defining formalism as essential to the techniques and intellectual horizons of literary studies. Never mind that Eliot’s essays were far more speculative and rambling than the close readings reproduced in classrooms, or that many of modernism’s greatest early champions, from Edmund Wilson to Hugh Kenner, were hardly invested in...
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