Among the poets who began the now widely recognized revival of interest in work in meter, Timothy Steele is the most stylistically stringent and also the most highly regarded for his broadly appealing poetry. Though New Formalism may not be a movement in any strict sense of the term--that is, with common principles and allegiances shared by all its principal figures--Steele is clearly a New Formalist. He is also a principal exponent of what may be the clearest and most straightforward version of its poetics, both as exemplified in his poems and as explained in his prose, which addresses the milieu of the literary historian and the teacher of poetry, and common readers with no academic sanctions.

Timothy Reid Steele was born on 22 January 1948 in Burlington, Vermont, to Edward William Steele, a teacher, and Ruth Reid Steele, a nurse. Vermont is clearly Robert Frost territory, and Steele encountered...