ABOUT THIS BOOK

By the close of the nineteenth century, many poets had abandoned rhyme and meter in favor of “free verse.” Nearly one hundred years later, a growing number of younger poets are reclaiming traditional conventions of prosody by composing rhymed and measured poetry.

Missing Measures is the first full articulation of the aesthetics of this new movement. Timothy Steele, one of the best of those poets who are sometimes called the “New Formalists,” treats his subject against a backdrop of the long history of ideas about poetry, formulated first by the ancients and re-examined and re-interpreted by subsequent writers.

Steele offers a new perspective on the wholesale departure from tradition proclaimed in modernist critical justifications. A rare marriage of clear writing, careful scholarship, and bold thinking, Missing Measures provides a vital new movement with a critical manifesto.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Timothy Steele was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1948. He has a doctorate from Brandeis University and receieved a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He is an associate professor of English at California State University in Los Angeles. Steele is the author of two collections of poetry, Uncertainties and Unrest and Sapphics Against Anger. Recipient of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Steele lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Victoria.

REVIEWS

“Professor Steele … must be among the most eminent and most respected of the recent wave of younger poets dubbed the New Formalists. With his Sapphics Against Anger, Steele stepped to the front of a fast-rising movement. But as yet nobody knows that Steele also happens to be the best critic that the movement has produced—the most ambitious, well read, and intelligent. I expect Missing Measures to break to the world the good news about him. … Certain to provoke controversy, Steele’s arguments strike me as so forceful, so well thought through, that anyone who assails them will find the going difficult.”
—X. J. Kennedy

“[Missing Measures] will be controversial. Steele upsets a number of applecarts which have been having an easy ride for the last few decades.”
—Donald E. Stanford

“Timothy Steele’s excellent book is not a formalist manifesto but an even-handed scholarly account of the whole background of ‘free verse’ poetics.”
—Richard Wilbur

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Poetry And Precedent: The Modern Movement and Free Verse

1. The Identification of Meter with Dated Diction and Subject Matter

2. Earlier Reformations of Poetic Diction and Subject Matter

2. " The Superior Art" : Verse And Prose and Modern Poetry

1. Prose Seeking Order on the Model of Poetry

2. The Shift from Fiction in Meter to Fiction in Prose

3. Poetry Seeking Freedom on the Model of Prose

3. The Reverses Of Time: The Origin and History of the Distinction Between Verse and Poetry

1. The Ancient Sources of the Modern Distinction

2. The Renaissance Conflation of Aristotle, Quintilian, Plutarch, and Servius

3. The Modern Opposition of Verse and Poetry

4. Free Verse and Aestheticism

1. The Background of Aestheticism

2. Autonomous Poetry, Autonomous Poet

3. From Organic Form to Free Verse

4. The Rise of Music, the Fall of Poetry

5. Versification as Musical Form

5. Sciences of Sentiment: The Crisis of Experimental Poetry

1. Progressive Science, Regressive Poetry?

2. The New as the True: Novelty, Modern Verse, and Science

3. Impersonality and Skepticism: The Poet as Scientist

4. Data and Method: Poetry as Fact or Formula

5. Superstition and Experiment

Conclusion

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

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