‘There is an element in all this of what the Russian formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky, called ‘defamiliarisation’. ‘As perception becomes blurred by habit’, Shklovsky suggested, ‘it becomes automatic’, and ‘we see the object as though it were hidden in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette.’ Gradually the machinery of habitualsation devours everything: ‘object, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’. We begin to lose our sense of things, and it could be added (although Shklovsky does not say so) our sense of ourselves, our own separate identities too. [. . . . } ‘The purpose of art is to give a sensation of the object as something seen, not something recognised. The technique of art is to make things unfamiliar’.’

American Poetry of the 20th Century by Richard Gray p.22

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