Of poets born since World War II who continue to work in meter, Timothy Steele is among the most highly regarded. In recent years he has further emerged as a leading critic and theoretician of that casually organized movement in recent American poetry sometimes called New Formalism.

The son of Edward William Steele, a teacher, and Ruth Reid Steele, a nurse, Timothy Reid Steele was born in Burlington, Vermont, on 22 January 1948. His boyhood in a part of New England remote from Boston might seem to place him in the shadow of Robert Frost, whose poems he encountered in grade school. But, although his poems recall Frost's in their fondness for synecdoche and understatement and in their devotion to traditional form, the comparison soon flags. It is difficult to imagine the modest Steele as a media figure and a performing poet-philosopher. His poetry, even when it seems to arise...