Timothy Steele
November 2006

Born in 1948 in Burlington, Vermont, Timothy Steele was educated in the public schools in Burlington and at Stanford (B.A. 1970) and Brandeis (Ph.D. 1977). Steele’s principal collections of poems are Uncertainties and Rest (1979), Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (1986), The Color Wheel (1994), and Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). The first two of these volumes were re-issued together in 1995 under the title of Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986.

Steele has also published two widely discussed works of literary criticism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (1990) and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (1999); and he has edited The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1997).

Steele’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for the study of prosody from the West Chester University Poetry Conference. Since 1977, he has lived in Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.


Statement for Poet of the Month

Because I use meter and rhyme, critics have labeled me a “formalist.” But I have never liked that term. It suggests a preoccupation with style at the expense of content, whereas I believe that the two are equally important.

Indeed, one reason the traditional instruments of verse are valuable is that they encourage poets to think deeply and flexibly about their subjects. The exigencies of meter often lead us to examine our thoughts and feelings from perspectives that we might not otherwise adopt. In seeking to harmonize expression and measure, we are unlikely to content ourselves with the first words that occur to us, but will try out different phrasal and clausal arrangements—perhaps eventually lighting upon a formulation that is more interesting, comprehensive, and truer than that suggested by early impulse. Moreover, when we are obliged to think not only reasonably but rhythmically, we give intuition freer play than it would receive under other circumstances. And when we rhyme, we frequently discover not only correspondences between syllables, but also illuminating connections between concepts and images.

Overall, the devices of poetic structure aid and support memory, pleasing the ear, nourishing the mind, and fortifying language against the corruption and triviality that threaten it at every turn in public life and culture.

Yet as deeply as I believe in the value of metrical composition, I have never argued or felt that vers libre is wrong or immoral or that meter is right and pure. The experimental school of Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams has its own beauties and achievements. But we can prize them justly and build on them only if we understand and appreciate traditional versification. Free verse cannot be free unless it has something to be free of.

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