Yet Malachi himself is no mere formalist.
To the formalist proper it was self-condemned in its pretension to develop the content of thought and its rejection of the formula of bare-identity.
There is an epistemological logic with sometimes formalist, sometimes methodological leanings.
The formalist accretions of English prosody can be very tasking and restrictive - prescriptive even, as in any other language.
It will use computational stylistics for a formalist discrimination of patterns of language in the texts and will thus begin with a descriptive base.