Steele's book was more than anomalous. In a milieu that most often featured poets speaking casually about some aspect of their life or interest in short-lined, imagistic free verse, Steele instead featured poem after poem in various structures of meter and rhyme. Some talked about (presumably) the author's life, but others were discursive, even essayistic investigations of abstract topics, dramatic monologue, and even epigrams and light verse. In fact, they featured an impressive range of subjects, tones, and forms. Yet with the exception of one poem in a loosely accentual line, none of the poems was in free verse.

Steele's work has varied little since. In fact, of all the poets associated with the Expansive school—the group of poets devoted to restoring traditional form and narrative to contemporary American poetry, and which Uncertainties and Rest helped inaugurate—perhaps none more exemplifies the "traditional form" aspect of the movement than Steele. After a recent flurry of publication—his third book, The Color Wheel, was released by Johns Hopkins in 1994, while Arkansas reissued his first two books in 1995—it is possible, and useful, to take a long view of Steele's career and his relationship to literary tradition.

Steele is traditional in several senses. First, he is traditional in his choice of forms: all three of his books are written mostly in various metrical and rhyme schemes, and in a plain language that descends from Ben Jonson and John Dryden to Robert Frost and Yvor Winters in the twentieth century. Second, he is traditional in his approach to his subject: he presents his ideas and emotions directly, clearly, and logically, in a manner that can be easily paraphrased, usually without the indirection, allusiveness and irony that characterizes much contemporary poetry. And third, he is traditional in his method: he writes poems about a variety of subjects that engage his interest, and though larger themes can be discerned in his work, he does not obsessively chase one or two subjects, as do many contemporary poets. Moreover, he champions his aesthetic approaches as a critic.

To describe Steele in these terms is not to present an indictment, but to outline the degree to which his work has differed from the mainstream of twentieth-century American poetry. He is not unique, but unusual enough to merit attention for his differences from the mainstream. His achievement as a poet, however, is such that he differs from the mainstream far less today than when he began writing—an important marker of the range and substance of his influence. In short, he has helped to change the course of the stream.

Steele's poetry is best described by a statement he makes in his critical book, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (Arkansas, 1990):

During the seven years between Uncertainties and Rest and Sapphics against Anger (1986), Steele's work underwent a subtle maturation. As noted, he was already accomplished formally when his first book was published, but he left behind the youthful alienation that was so prevalent in Uncertainties and Rest. In fact, Sapphics against Anger, to a degree, critiques the restless passion of the poems in the earlier book. The collection's title poem is a case in point:

Perhaps the strongest poem in Sapphics against Anger is "Near Olympic," a long exploration of a mixed west Los Angeles neighborhood. Written in rhymed couplets, Steele's portrait of that landscape and the people who inhabit it is affectionate and detailed, bristling with observation:

This poem notes the contrast between the adult speaker's present balmy winter and the chilly winters of his youth. The speaker recalls his racing to catch the school bus on an icy street with amusement and affection, yet without undue nostalgia; he treats his present environment, Los Angeles, with as much tenderness as he does the past, hoping to bring forth beauty in the flowers. In this poem, observation of the natural environment blends with memory to paint a warm picture of human interaction with place.

It should be fairly clear that Steele's poetry does not just differ from the modernist-influenced mainstream of contemporary poetry; it is largely a repudiation of that mainstream. As McPhillips notes: "He writes as if the modernist movement had never occurred" (314). Steele, though, is well aware that the modernist movement occurred, and in Missing Measures, he devotes considerable effort to critiquing modernism and its aftermath. In fact, Missing Measures is one of the seminal critical texts of Expansive poetry. The book is a comprehensive analysis of the modernist free verse revolution, examining in meticulous detail the assumptions of the modernist poets—particularly Eliot, Pound and Williams—in their experimentation with free verse, and the unintended consequences of that experimentation.

Steele suggests that the key assumption of the modernists—an erroneous one, he argues—is their identification of the stilted formalism of late Victorian poetry with meter itself, and their conclusion that to renovate poetry required abandoning meter. This is a radical step compared to the earlier innovators that T.S. Eliot often compared the modernists to; the Romantic and, before them, Augustan poets altered poetry's subject matter and diction but did not reject meter itself. "[The modernists] believed that in order to get rid of Victorian style they also had to get rid of meter, which of course had been employed by the Victorians but was not specifically Victorian, having been used by centuries of earlier poets" (6-7)

The modernists rejected meter for several reasons, Steele suggests. One reason is related to the modernists' cultural anxiety over the status of verse, which by the nineteenth century had lost its status as the primary art to prose, a significant shift. He notes: "Much of the history of prose style concerns efforts to make prose as memorable and as attractive as verse and to secure for prose a quasi-metrical integrity so that it can achieve an emotional power comparable to poetry" (9). The modernists took the opposite view: "Whereas in earlier times prose writers experimented with incorporating verse cadences into prose, poets now began to experiment with integrating the relative rhythms of prose into verse. Prose becomes, in short, the primary art. In this context, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound's assertion that, as Ford puts it, 'verse must be at least as well written as prose if it is to be poetry,' gets transmuted into the notion that verse might profitably be written as the novel is written—without meter" (9).

The reason the modernists felt they could write poetry without meter descends from an ancient philosophical confusion over the definition of poetry. Steele identifies a conflation by Renaissance philosophers of Aristotle's Poetics with Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, which drew a distinction between poetry (in the Renaissance, writing that especially and intensely imitates nature) and verse (writing in meter). Though the contexts of this distinction changed over the centuries, the distinction itself remained, and the modernists frequently made use of it in their essays. In modernist theory and practice, Steele notes, the idea "that poetry is something more than meter is transformed into the idea that poetry is something other than meter. One finds in much modern criticism, especially in that of Eliot, the belief that conventional metrical composition is less admirable than poetry which eschews regular meter in preference for some more 'difficult' quality of rhythm" (10).

Another factor in the modernists' sense of poetic purity is nineteenth century aestheticism, its emphasis on formal purity, and its notions of organic form. Aestheticism—the "art for art's sake" movement with roots in Kant's Critique of Judgment—treated works of art as autonomous, unified creations, whose qualities were judged only through a response to the work itself, and not by extrinsic standards. Steele notes, "If every poem is defined in terms of an independent internal unity, it follows that every poem may or even should create its own prosody" rather than follow a fixed, predetermined form (11). Accompanying an artistic emphasis on purity is an elevation of music—the most purely formal, non-referential form of art—to the top of artistic hierarchy, reflected in Pound's command that poets should "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." This command focuses on the broad category rather than the more narrow category of fixed metrical measure, and not only allows free verse, but privileges it as the more "pure" formal practice (12).

Buttressing this elevation of free verse's formal purity over traditional form is a shift in poets' understanding of the phrase "organic form," a term that parallels aesthetic practice with the natural world. In the Romantic period, poets saw no contradiction between nature and meter since, in their view, nature proceeded according to fixed principles of development. By the turn of the century, though, poets' definition of "organic form" had changed:

Rather than urging that poets should create, as nature does, according to certain regulating principles of development, some observers contend that poets should function, as nature functions, unconsciously. And rather than imitating the comeliness of natural objects, some poets, such as D.H. Lawrence, seek to suggest the internal processes that determine those objects. To the extent that these processes are regarded as being elementally turbulent or chaotic, verse that is intentionally confused comes to be considered truer to nature than is verse of a more orderly kind. To the extent that metrical speech embodies clear structural principles, it is therefore discouraged as not only unnecessary to poetical-natural truth but inappropriate to it. (12)

This shift in definition of organic form parallels scientific developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—particularly those of Darwin, Freud and Einstein—and leads to what Steele identifies as the final factor in the free verse revolution, the influence of science on poets.

Scientific discourse exerted great influence on the modernist poets. Although they were in certain senses deeply rooted in tradition—the range of reference in The Waste Land and The Cantos, as well as Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," proves this point—the modernist poets also saw themselves as innovators in the same sense as Darwin, Freud and others, innovators whose ideas radically changed the world in which they lived. In their view, relentless experimentation—constantly introducing new ideas and forms that would subsume earlier ones, or render them obsolete—was the only way to write genuine poetry in the modern world: "The modern's leaders transferred to poetry this model of scientific history. This transferral undermined the older view that, in poetic composition, the safest guides are provided by the examples of earlier masterpieces. In addition, the transferral encouraged the notion that the literary past is, like the scientific past, largely irrelevant to present practice" (14).

Steele's response to this conclusion is one of frank despair. He is worth quoting at length:

What happened was different from what the leaders of the modern movement anticipated. Their revolution triumphed. But a new metric did not emerge. And the inheritors of the legacy of the modern movement, their numbers growing from decade to decade, simply went on writing without meter. The interim period was repeatedly and indefinitely extended. Originally a means of examining the old measures or of testing whether new measures were possible, free verse itself became a "form." Whereas the early experimentalists had pursued heterodox versification in the interests of poetic purity, their followers employed such procedures in an increasingly casual fashion, the revolution having undermined the metrical tradition and metrical awareness that gave the procedures significance in the first place.

Today, one almost hesitates to say that most poets write unmetrically: such a statement suggests that they know what meter is, which does not appear to be the case. Rather, it seems that versification, as it has been understood for millennia, is for the majority of contemporary poets an irrelevant matter. And looking back across our century, one may feel that metrical tradition resembles a signal which has been growing fainter and fainter. (280-281)

Taken as a factual description of twentieth-century poetic practice, Steele's conclusion is indisputable. Free verse is the lingua franca of twentieth century American poetry, the dominant form. Although Steele cites brief revivals of traditional form in the 1950s, and distinguished work in traditional forms by individual poets throughout the century, these exceptions prove the rule of free verse.

Steele's entire project, as both poet and critic, seems to be to overturn the rule of free verse, or at least cut back its hegemony. Unlike most of the Expansive poets, Steele has only published a few poems in free verse. And his poems show little of the influence of free verse that other Expansive poets, such as Molly Peacock, display. He is devoted to demonstrating the viability and vitality of traditional form in the contemporary age, and in doing so, critiquing, even combating, the age's received form (the once) avant-garde practice of free verse. As both poet and critic, Steele is a traditionalist's traditionalist.

One reasonable objection to Steele's ideas is that, like it or not, free verse is deeply entrenched in literary tradition; at this point in history, it is a literary tradition, one that any accurate literary history must contend with. Although Missing Measures does contend with this tradition with meticulous scholarship, it also battles against it with polemic force. Steele is not only reporting literary history, he is attempting to change its future course. Certainly that is a legitimate aim of any historical scholarship: to show the relevance of the past to the present, and therefore future. And, as noted, Steele's conclusions are indisputable: the tide of free verse has swept away most of the flora and fauna of traditional forms. The recent resurgence of traditional form in the work of the Expansive poets (of whom Steele is one of the leading members) cannot change that fact.

One may ask, though, whether traditional form must be opposed with free verse so radically. In Missing Measures, Steele does not allow that the best free verse can partake deeply of traditional forms: Annie Finch's recent book The Ghost of Meter is a detailed exploration of the way that poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Stephen Crane and Eliot engage metrical traditions in their free verse. And Finch does not focus on Pound, whose blending of different prosodies—Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Provençal, among others—came closest to establishing the new measure that the modernists sought. As Donald Hall, a distinguished practitioner of both traditional form and free verse, argues:

Although Pound's place in literary history remains a deeply troubled one, Hall is correct on this point: Pound was a superb prosodist, deeply indebted to various metrical traditions even as he rebelled against them.

Apart from the fact that good free verse cannot escape traditional forms, it is also worth considering that the free verse revolution is part of a historical continuum. Critiquing Missing Measures, Vernon Shetley argues that "prosody evolves," and he situates free verse "within the general history of English metrical development, in which one might see the colloquial freedoms taken by Browning, the dissolution of accent in Tennyson, and Hardy's movement toward what even Steele refers to as a 'rhymed accentual verse' as stages toward the eventual step of more radical 'free' prosodies" (155). It would be wrong to make the development of free verse a historical inevitability (particularly given the historical precedent of Hebrew poetry, the earliest known free verse, or even the alliterative-accentual prosody of Old English poetry, which, by ignoring syllable count, is "freer" than iambic pentameter). Within limits, though, Shetley's argument makes sense. Although the modernists were extreme in throwing meter out with the Victorian bathwater, there is a certain logical progression from Tennyson and Browning to Eliot and Pound and Williams to Olson, Creeley, Snyder, Levertov, and Bly. If one substitutes Whitman and Emerson for Tennyson and Browning, the lineage becomes even clearer.

Therefore: free verse's relationship to literary tradition is more complex than Steele allows. This oversimplification, though, is essential to his argument, and qualifying these issues about free verse does not diminish his fundamental point: that free verse, once a vigorous experiment that sought to renovate traditional prosody, has itself become a conservative, received form that in current practice seldom engages with the traditional prosodies that gave it birth and give it vitality. Restoring traditional prosodies is, at this point in literary history, a necessary task. And, as both poet and critic, no one has done more in that task than Steele.

It is a measure of Steele's impact that although he seems a staunch conservative on aesthetic issues even among the Expansive poets, the value, relevance and necessity of traditional prosodies for contemporary poetry seems indisputable.

Would critics be scrambling to connect free verse to traditional form without his example? It seems unlikely. Taken on his own terms, Steele is a substantial poet who has crafted a body of work that should, in some form, endure. He is as skillful a traditional poet as one could find, yet his poetry, in its subjects and themes, is distinctly of our time. Also, he is an erudite critic whose work has had a measurable impact on the literary climate of its time. The most traditional of traditionalists, Steele has shown that, for poets, there need be no conflict between the past and the present—an accomplishment that given the recent history of American poets, is as rare as it is welcome.

WORKS CITED:

Finch, Annie. The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Hall, Donald. Poetry and Ambition.. Essays 1982-1988. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.

McPhillips, Robert. "Reading the New Formalists." Poetry after Modernism. Ed. Robert McDowell. Brownsville, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1991.300-328.

Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry. Poet and Audience in Contemporary America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Steele, Timothy. The Color Wheel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990.

Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995.

Return