Timothy Steele and Metrical Poetry

Timothy Steele's 1990 book is an interesting salvo in the conflict regarding the relative value of free verse and metrical verse. Steele considers the growth and current dominance of free verse a striking development when placed against a 2,500-year history of metrical verse. In my opinion, he is more interesting when responding to many of the criticisms of metrical verse than he is in pointing out the misguided choices of modern/contemporary poets. His spirited defense encourages readers to discover what is valuable about meter and what might be lost in the era of its near-demise.

But on the other hand, his firm devotion to meter paradoxically threatens to undermine its importance. Points which seem compelling at first undergo a strange transformation after further scrutiny. Take for example this point: "Shakespeare, for instance, wrote thirty-seven five-act plays in iambic pentameter and approximately 150 sonnets in the same line" (164). Steele employs this strategy throughout his book: cite the use of meter by all the great poets in the history of Western civilization. Unfortunately for Steele, the point about Shakespeare makes me wonder what it is about Shakespeare other than meter that make him such a fascinating writer. In other words, meter being equal, there must be something else that sets him apart from other writers using iambic pentameter. The plenitude and longevity of certain metrical forms forces one to consider non-metrical matters when attempting to discover what is unique and provocative about poets and poems.

Steele easily refutates the reasons often given for the rise of free verse, but he does not convincingly provide a positive explanation for its dominance. It seems to me that the death of meter is largely due to the duration of its unquestioned dominance. That is, the Victorian age so valued meter that other poetic qualities in late Victorian writing moved to fiction or simply dried up. There is so much dreadful verse that flows so metrically. Without the support of meter, poets are forced to search for some other unifying method. In order to invigorate poetry, new writers needed to resuscitate and highlight other techniques. The New Critical revolution emphasized poetic figures such as irony, structure, imagery, repetition, etc. Steele condemns Eliot's concept of "music" over meter, but Eliot's point is well-taken: a poet must do more than search for every purling spring (to quote Sir Philip Sidney).