Timothy Steele
| Timothy Steele | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
January 22, 1948 Burlington, Vermont, U.S. |
| Alma mater |
Stanford University Brandeis University |
| Spouse | Victoria Lee Steele |
Timothy Steele is an American poet. Steele generally writes in meter and rhyme, and his early poems, which began appearing in the 1970s in such magazines as Poetry, The Southern Review, and X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures, are said to have anticipated and contributed to the revival of traditional verse associated with the New Formalism. He, however, has objected to being called a New Formalist, saying that he doesn't claim to be doing anything technically novel and that Formalism "suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutually vital in any successful poem." Notwithstanding his reservations about the term, 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.
Born in Burlington, Vermont in 1948, Steele attended the city's public schools. At an early age, he became interested in poetry, including that of Robert Frost, who was appointed the state's Poet Laureate in 1961, and William Shakespeare, several of whose plays were staged each summer at a Shakespeare festival at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Steele received his baccalaureate degree in English (1970) from Stanford University and a master's (1972) and doctorate (1977) in English and American Literature from Brandeis University, where he studied with the well-known poet and Renaissance scholar J. V. Cunningham, a collected edition of whose poems Steele would later edit.
Timothy Steele is married to Victoria Steele, a librarian who is known for her work as the former Head of UCLA's Special Collections, Director of the research collections for the New York Public Library, and as UCLA’s Curator of Humanities’ Programs, Centers, and Collections. She is an art and library exhibitions consultant.
From 1975 to 1977, Steele served as a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford. Subsequently, he held lectureships at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. He is an emeritus professor in the English Department at California State University, Los Angeles, where he taught from 1987 until 2012.
Steele's poems fuse traditional verse forms with contemporary subjects and, in Kennedy's words, "express appreciation both for the life of the mind and for the sensuous world." Writing in Library Journal, Rob Fure characterized Steele's first collection, Uncertainties and Rest (1979), as "a lovely book ... the formality of Steele's poetry is so delicate that it never intimidates." Of his second book, Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (1986), Kathryn Hellerstein wrote in Partisan Review, "Steele's formal range is impressive. Each poem works in a different stanza ... Their subjects, evoked in exquisite imagery, are entryways to noumena, the pure abstractions of the mind." Speaking in The Sewanee Review of The Color Wheel (1994), R. S. Gwynn said, "Timothy Steele's poetry exemplifies the order that he praises, but ultimately it is both the charity and the clarity of his vision that are most remarkable." And Booklist's Ray Olson, reviewing Toward the Winter Solstice (2006), described Steele as "so technically adroit that he could write about anything and produce a poem repeatedly rewarding for music and shapeliness alone."
...
Wikipedia