The Trappings of Formalism

...no literary formalism, no matter how accurate and enriching in its analytic powers, is ever allowed to come into being without seeming reductive. When form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable."

De Man (365)

De Man seems to be trying to fight for formalism, but he wants to erase all the qualities we know about a formalist reading. I'm not sure how tied to formalism he is because he talks about going outside of the text. I don't know how much I agree with form "trapping" a literary meaning because it is within the form that we discover the meaning.