Sapphics and Uncertainties

Timothy Steele is an American poet and scholar. Steele generally writes in meter and rhyme, and his early poems, which began appearing in the early 1970s in such magazines as Poetry, The Southern Review, and X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures, are sometimes said to have anticipated and contributed to the revival of traditional verse associated with the New Formalism movement. Steele's poetry is more strictly "formal" than the work of most New Formalists in that he rarely uses inexact rhymes or metrical substitutions, and is sparing in his use of enjambment. In addition to four collections of poems, he is the author of two books on prosody: Missing Measures, a study of the literary and historical background of modern free verse; and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing, an introduction to English versification. Steele was an original faculty member of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, and received its Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award in 2004.