Russian Formalism
Quick answer: Russian Formalism studied how poems work: device, defamiliarisation and literariness. Meet Shklovsky and Jakobson and apply their ideas to your craft.
Russian Formalism was a school of literary criticism, active in Russia from about 1915 to 1930, that studied literature as a craft of devices rather than a window onto the author's soul or society. Its central question was not what a poem means but how it works: what specific techniques make language literary at all. Its most famous answer, 'defamiliarisation', says art exists to make the familiar strange so we can see it again.
Strictly speaking this is a movement of critics, not poets, and it is worth being clear about that. Poets still profit from it enormously. The Formalists produced the sharpest toolbox ever assembled for talking about rhythm, sound, plot and image, and their ideas quietly underpin most modern craft teaching, including the way workshops discuss 'what the poem is doing'.
History and Key Figures
Two groups made the school: OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language in St Petersburg, and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Viktor Shklovsky fired the starting gun with his 1917 essay 'Art as Device', arguing that habit devours perception and art's job is to slow seeing down. Roman Jakobson studied what he called 'literariness', the features that distinguish verbal art from ordinary speech; Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov extended the method to prose and literary history.
Soviet pressure ended the school around 1930, but Jakobson carried its ideas west, feeding Prague structuralism and, at several removes, the New Criticism and every close-reading classroom since.
The Big Ideas, Made Practical
Defamiliarisation ('ostranenie') is the one to keep. Habit lets you stop seeing your street, your spouse, the word 'heart'; a device, an odd angle, a strange comparison, a broken rhythm, restores the difficulty of perception, and with it the freshness. An invented example: calling a glove 'a small leather theatre for five actors' forces you to see gloves again.
The Formalists also distinguished story from plot, the events versus their arrangement, and treated metre as organised violence against ordinary speech rhythm: useful, unsentimental ways to think about your own drafts.
Using Formalist Thinking on Your Drafts
Read your draft asking only 'what device is doing the work in this line?' Where the honest answer is none, revise. Check whether your images refresh perception or merely decorate; 'her eyes were stars' passed through habit's stomach long ago. The Formalists' cold eye is a gift precisely because it ignores your intentions and looks at what the words actually do.
What poets can take from this
- Audit a draft line by line for the device doing the work; lines with no answer are padding.
- Test every image for freshness: if you have met it before, the reader has met it a hundred times.
- Describe one familiar object as if you had never seen its kind; that is defamiliarisation in practice.
- Rearrange the order of events in a narrative poem at least once; plot is arrangement, and arrangement is meaning.
- Break an established rhythm exactly where the sense breaks; metre disturbed is metre used.
Try it yourself
Take the most ordinary action of your day, boiling a kettle, locking a door, and write a poem describing it as a visiting stranger would, forbidden all its usual names. Make the reader work to recognise it, then reward them.
Questions
Is Russian Formalism a poetry movement?
No, it is a school of criticism and literary theory. Its members analysed poems rather than published them, though they worked closely alongside the Futurist poets. It appears in poetry glossaries because its concepts shape how poems are discussed and taught.
What does defamiliarisation mean?
Shklovsky's term 'ostranenie', making strange. Habit automatises perception until we no longer see things; art uses devices to slow perception and return strangeness to the familiar. It remains one of the most useful ideas a poet can own.
How did Russian Formalism influence later criticism?
Through Roman Jakobson it fed Prague structuralism and then French structuralism, and its device-centred close reading parallels the Anglo-American New Criticism. Most modern craft talk about 'what the text does' descends from it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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