Robert B. Shaw and the Poetry of New England

Reviewing Robert Shaw’s first book of poems (Comforting the Wilderness, 1977) in the pages of Ploughshares, Paul Breslin thought it a sign of “a gradual revival of interest in the well-made poem.” After nearly two decades of American poetry disrobing itself of meter, grammar, and intelligibility, all in the name of a naked “intensity,” Breslin wondered whether Shaw might indicate a return to “poetry with an identifiable, impersonal subject, a paraphrasable argument, and a traditional formal organization: stanzas, rhymes, accentual-syllabic meter.” Breslin even praised Shaw as a “new formalist” almost a decade before other critics would coin the term “New Formalism” as a term of opprobrium and a group of young poets would embrace it and start a movement.