To Die By a Rose Thorn.

"poems are not...simply emotions..they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things...and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning..."
-Rilke
In Rilke's statement and his poetry alike, I find a tangible example of formalism present. Not only this, but I found solace as a reader in "not simply emotions". The idea Eliot and the Formalists preach causes me a degree of anxiety. Critiquing a poem changes shape with each explanation of the affective and intentional fallacies. What should I look at in a poem? Art for art's sake? How does one go about that? How does this affect me as a reader? How should I be a good reader under the formalist banner?
Rilke's explanation of poetry resembles Eliot who said that a poet must be a garbage disposal...collecting bits and pieces of the world around us and storing it in our creativity for later. To Rilke this collecting occurred watching the products of nature and humankind (cities). Here is where R.M. Rilke has captured the essence of critiquing formalist poetry- it is not the emotion or that the poem is emotional. Poetry is things and how things work and how they live and thrive. Things could be expanded upon to incorporate linguistic and structural purity.
As a writer, Rilke incorporates a bit of Romantic Theory into the formalism applied to readership. Rilke, from the above quote, acknowledges that he is in fact a slave to the "single poem". Emerson and the Romantics understood the poet to be "in tune" with the world around him or her in such a way that the poet served as interpreter and deciphered nature's signs to others. I understood the idea of describing the blooming flower as a means of perceiving the world at an elevated state from those that are not poets. Yet, Rilke was by NO means a Romantic as a friend of Rodin and modern thinker. In fact, he relates closely with the Formalists in style and attention to art over reader emotion.