Donald Petersen (1928-2005) was a formalist poet who believed, citing John Crowe Ransom, “that a man ought to write better than he speaks.” Petersen finished his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Iowa in 1952. At Iowa he studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman; at the Indiana School of Letters he studied with Ransom, Allen Tate, and Delmore Schwartz.
He published two books, The Spectral Boy (Wesleyan University Press) in 1964 and Early and Late: Selected Poems (Ivan R. Dee) in 2001. He taught at State University at New York at Oneonta for 38 years. “He is a perfectionist,” Donald Justice said, “willing to spend actual years polishing and repolishing his poems.” Of his own poetry, Petersen said:
In a time when partly-formed verse is being widely published and praised, the attempt to write a finished poem may not be fashionable, but it is still worth making. Poetry must present not merely what one has observed with interest or amusement, not merely a bright array of words, but the things that a man has loved and hated and feared in his lifetime.
Formalism, in 2026, sometimes seems like something from grandma’s house: plastic on the sofas and a glass dish of Werther’s Originals placed there during the Johnson Administration. But formalism can also provide a structural system to give a poem its context, unfolding, and a way to move forward concepts like a poem’s plot and ideas.
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