https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/11/why-no-one-wants-to-be-a-new-formalist/
“If I have to belabelledd, I myself prefer the term “retro-formalist”, which at least sounds vaguely cool, like wearing vintage clothing and listening to vinyl, something so square it’s hip.
So what is NF? Just who ARE these embarrassing people? British poets who work in form and meter are apparently just being… British (that Modernism stuff was all very American and Continental after all), i.e., old formalists. New Formalists have to be American for some reason. Is it people who have studied with Yvor Winters? People who returned to form and painfully relearned prosody from manuals after an apostasy in free verse? People who write screeds against a Modernism that was actually better grounded in craft and tradition than most working poets today? People who write exclusively in form? People who capitalize their lines? People who have published in a formal journal or attended West Chester, a craft-focused conference in Pennsylvania (where, yes, I have had the opportunity of both taking and teaching classes)?
Glibness aside, though, do I feel belligerent against free verse? No, I admire good free verse, I wish I wrote it better. Tennis without a net has its own beauties and choreography. But I write best (as more than one editor has pointed out to me when I tried to sneak in some free verse in a submission) when I write against the constraint and pressures of form–any constraint, really, be it syllabic, repetend, stanzaic, metrical, rhyme-schemed. I write… freer that way.”
How my heart sings 