One weekday evening, the telephone rang in the West Los Angeles home of a poetry professor.
"Is this Timothy Steele?"
"Yes."
The husky-voiced caller launched his salvo: "American poetry comes from Walt Whitman, you S.O.B. -- and you better wise up!"
The phone line went dead.
It's uncommon for poets to get hate calls. So why does the mild-mannered, scholarly and eminently affable Steele find himself under attack?
It all started nearly a decade ago with his book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter. Steele described how 2,500 years of metered verse, arranged according to specific rhythmical principles, gave way to free verse, which has dominated poetry for the last century in the wake of Whitman and others. (The lines of free verse are determined entirely by the poet's preferences.)
In Missing Measures, Steele, '70, took a stand for meter: "I believe that our ability to organize thought and speech into measure is one of the most precious endowments of the human race," he wrote. The Times Literary Supplement of London called Steele's history of metrical poetry "a wise and engrossing book" -- but many critics viewed it as a manifesto for "neo-formalist" poets emerging in the late '80s and '90s. Poet Ira Sadoff called the trend "dangerous nostalgia."
Undeterred, Steele has now published another book, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Ohio U. Press, 1999). Relaxing in the white bungalow-style home he shares with his wife, Victoria, and an equable beige cat named Cashmere, he quips, "Iambic pentameter -- now there's an idea whose time has come! After a century of experiment, being traditional has become cutting-edge."
Steele has his own explanation for the firestorm: "Several pretty powerful cartels don't want meter to come back. The book was a lightning rod for them." Cartels? These are, Steele explains, "principally people who look at poetry as a business, which it has sadly become, with the excesses of the creative writing industry and its networks of jobs, fellowships and prizes. Some of these people are worried that if meter comes back, they'll be somewhat left out."
Another sore point, Steele says, is that he reminded readers that the original free-versers hoped their revolution would lead to new metrical patterns, rather than "result in poetry's degenerating into lineated prose, which is sort of what's happened." In Missing Measures, Steele observed that it's a mistake to link free verse with political liberalism, or to assume that "free" is good and "not free" is bad -- when "not free" may simply mean more disciplined. Many free-verse pioneers, such as Pound and Eliot, were hardly political liberals, and most Harlem Renaissance poets, for example, stayed with meter.
Takeoff
Our jet storms down the runway, tilts up, lifts:
We're airborne, and each second we see more --
Outlying hangars, wetlands and pond
That flashes like sheened silver and, beyond,
An estuary and the frozen drifts
Of breakers wide and white along a shore.
One watches, cheek in palm. How little weight
The world has as it swiftly drops away!
How quietly the mind climbs to this height
As now, the seat-belt sign turned off, a flight
Attendant rises to negotiate
The steep aisle to a curtained service bay.
-- from The Color Wheel
(Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1994)
Missing Measures triggered another kind of reaction from a generation that knew little about the metric tradition. A number of readers approached Steele, saying that the real problem today was that young people no longer understood how meter worked. That realization was a driving force behind All the Fun. He offers an analogy: "It would be hard to understand basketball if you came to your first game cold, and just saw 10 people weaving around the court with a ball. A guidebook can be like a friend at your elbow, explaining the rules of the sport."
Steele also knew from experience that young people were eager to learn what amounts to a "lost language." His students at California State University-Los Angeles are bright and eager, he says, but they have read very little poetry. "I don't mean just poetry of the past. They don't seem to be reading Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams and Sexton and Ashbery, either. But if you show them good poetry, they get excited. They want to be liberated from the contemporary. They sense it is a trap to be involved in the MTV world."
All the Fun takes its title from a line by Robert Frost and offers a detailed but lively explanation of meter, substitutions, enjambment, caesural pauses, elision, clipped and broken-backed lines, full and partial rhymes and, among other stories, "The Famous Rise, Troublesome Reign, and Tragical Fall of the Metrical Apostrophe." Among the flood of prosody handbooks published in the last few years, Steele's 366-page book is heftier than most. He offers apt anecdotes and carefully described history, with poetic examples drawn from sources as varied as Jones Very, Kingsley Amis, Matthew Arnold, Chaucer and poets with Stanford ties -- among them, renowned professor Yvor Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis, and Steele's protégé, Vikram Seth, MA '79. For all that, his goal was modest: "I hoped some poets would rediscover the joy of writing in meter. I don't feel like a literary Julius Caesar, marching into Gaul."
Steele may be an unwitting crusader, but he comes by his poetic principles naturally. Although he considers himself a California poet, he grew up in Burlington, Vt. Robert Frost, the model for American metrical poets in the last half of the century, was the state's hero and poet laureate. "If for no other reason than his example, I would have been reluctant to write verse without first learning the rules of the art," Steele once told an interviewer.
There were, however, other mentors. At Brandeis, where he received his PhD, he studied with J.V. Cunningham, whose outlook on the state of poetry was this: "A generation of poets, acting on the principles and practice of significant variation, have at last nothing to vary from. The last variation is regularity."
Loaded labels -- "traditional," "formal" -- dogged Steele from the beginning. In the late 1970s, when the Louisiana State University Press sent his first poetry manuscript to outside referees, Steele recalls that one sniffed: "Does the Press want on its list at this time a collection that is this characteristically witty, formal and sophisticated?" LSU turned to Steele for response. "I did say that it sounded as if the referee were recommending that they rather publish poetry that is dull, haphazard and primitive." The presses rolled.
"I was impressed by his first book [of poems]," says poet X.J. Kennedy, who has published more than a dozen books of verse and prose, "but in his career, he has just got better and better. That is something few poets do. He is not only the finest formal poet of his generation, but he is the outstanding critic among those who still believe in metrical verse."
Steele simply hopes his work will encourage restraint and moderation. "I have no quarrel with a pluralism of poetic styles. It's just that the metrical tradition is the trunk of the great tree of poetry. The variant forms -- such as free verse and syllabics -- have their beauties, but they're branches. We aren't going to have the branch -- any branch -- if you cut down the trunk," he warns.
Steele pauses to stroke his long-haired cat. "I want to persuade people to turn off the chain saw. Don't cut down the tree!"
