Thinking about how my recent essay makes me sound anti-formalist. Formalism is the idea that in order to apprehend or evaluate a work of art you do not need historical or cultural context, nor do you need autobiography. I actually agree with this in more cases than not, though never absolutely. Take the "petals on a wet black bough" poem by Ezra Pound. I do not need to know that Pound was a fascist, or that he liked to carry luxurious canes or whatever, in order to understand his poem. The form is Pound's haiku-esque concision; the function is what it conveys. Some might say that the poem's function is purely aesthetic... but aesthetic is never really an isolated category. Usually an aesthetic experience means we have been impacted on a spiritual or emotional level. This impact has pragmatic consequences concerning how we view and react to our world. Art is a symbiotic and not a solipsistic experience.