Forms

Forms, as abstract patterns that make possible the articulation of disciplines, are common to both literature and politics. At the same time, the concrete practices of literature and politics can resist formal abstraction. This chapter examines how forms are central to a particular branch of politics known as “biopolitics,” the political regulation of life, and how literature can both express biopolitics in its use of forms and use forms to shape it. It does so through a process the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called “form-of-life,” after the medieval monastic forma vitae. Drawing on the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Nathaniel Mackey, the chapter demonstrates how form-of-life can be navigated through poetic forms that represent, critique, and reshape biopolitical norms.