Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele was born in 1948 in Burlington, Vermont. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University, and a doctorate in English and American literature from Brandeis University. His first collection of poems, Uncertainties and Rest, published in 1979, attracted attention for its colloquial charm and its allegiance to meter and rhyme at a time when free verse was the predominant style, especially among younger poets. Writing about the book in The Hudson Review, Richmond Lattimore called it "desperately and delightfully unfashionable."

Steele has published three additional collections: Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems, The Color Wheel, and most recently, Toward the Winter Solstice. He is also the author of a scholarly study of poetic modernism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter, about which Richard Wilbur wrote, "If it has not the slam-bang simplicity of polemic, it has something better: it is patiently evidential and well-nigh incontestable." His other prose includes All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification, designed mainly for students as a practical, nuts-and-bolts investigation of metrics.

Steele has often been associated with the New Formalism movement, but as the British poet and critic Peter Dale has noted, "his interest in, advocacy, and use of traditional form began much earlier than the stirrings of that amorphous grouping." Steele himself expresses doubts about the usefulness of the term, saying, "The only real New Formalist in English is Geoffrey Chaucer." He has emphasized his connections and debts to such earlier modern metrical practitioners as E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters, W. H. Auden, J. V. Cunningham (with whom Steele studied at Brandeis), Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Edgar Bowers, X. J. Kennedy, and Thom Gunn.

Among Steele's honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center's Award for Poetry, a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. He has held teaching appointments at Stanford and the University of California, in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Since 1987, he has served as professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.
(adapted from poets.org)

Online Resources:

Poetry Foundation profile
Academy of American Poets profile
Steele's CSU/LA home page
Steele's "Prosody for 21st-Century Poets"
Interview with Kevin Durkin
Interview with The Cortland Review

Selected Bibliography:

Toward the Winter Solstice (Swallow Press 2006)

All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing (Ohio University Press 1999)

The Color Wheel (The Johns Hopkins University Press 1994)

Missing Measures (University of Arkansas Press 1990)

Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (Random House 1986)

Uncertainties and Rest (Louisiana State University Press 1979)