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Though Wiman does at times write in free verse, a significant enough portion of his work is written with some measure of form he has been associated especially earlier in his career with New Formalism. On the topic of form, Wiman wrote in an essay “An Idea of Order” included in his collection Ambition and Survival

“Many poets and critics now almost automatically distrust any work that exhibits formal coherence, stylistic finish, and closure. Occasionally they simply dismiss such work as naive or reactionary. At other times, and probably more damagingly, they either subtly devalue or patronize the work in question, praising the craftsmanship of the poems in such terms as make it clear that this is not ‘important’ poetry. The hardcore version of this argument goes something like this: because our experience of the world is chaotic and fragmented, and because we’ve lost our faith not only in those abstractions by means of which men and women of the past ordered their lives but also in language itself, it would be naïve to think that we could have such order in our art. [In this view] A poet who persists in imposing order upon our uncertainty is either unconscious, ironic, or irrelevant.” : Major critics and Wiman himself, however, have distanced him from neo-formalism. David Biespeil in American Poetry Review’ wrote, “if Wiman is a formalist, he’s the kind who ditches the grandiose.” Wiman’s poetry takes its reference points from lived experience rather than from any literary tradition. Of his own taste, Wiman writes in ‘ ‘Ambition and Survival’’ “more and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language.”

Wiman’s poetry is characterized by multiple possible and intended readings, and metaphors which either are derived from a space or an absence or go through an evolution throughout the poem. One technique Wiman uses to communicate dual intended readings, is through repetition and scrupulous variation of punctuation and line-breaks. Thematic preoccupations of Wiman’s poetry include the absence of God and difficulties and necessities of encountering the world whether with faith of without. Omar Sabbagh compares Wiman to Simone Veil and Jürgen Moltmann saying “Whether we call it ‘affliction,’ ‘the void,’ or what have you, these Christian thinkers were eminently modernist in seeing God, not as necessity, but as ‘contingency.’” Wiman’s poetry has been compared stylistically to Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, but on an interview on his own influences, Wiman said, “for sheer sound, though, I'd give more credit—or blame—to Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, and Robert Frost.”