Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter

by Timothy Steele

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.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Writing

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both an objective account of the creation of modernist poetry and a refutation of its premises. Yes, refutation, as the author believes the problems modernism identified weren't real. Steele goes to great lengths, however, to take the arguments of the great modernists seriously, constantly citing from the manifestoes, essays, and lectures of Hulme, Ford, Pound, Eliot, Williams. The central argument of the book is that the decoupling of verse and poetry, where the former is seen as an option and the latter as the essence of the art, led to the deterioration of our modern understanding of literature, and only through a revival of the classical notion of verse and poetry being one in the same can we hope overcome this "cult of the new." Steele shows through a long, genealogical analysis of the concept of verse, extending back through the Romanticists to the Renaissance, and back from them to the Romans and their interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics, how this distinction of verse/poetry made by Eliot and Pound is the result of a series of literal misreadings, specifically of Quintilian.

The book has several minor arguments that continually reappear throughout it, such as how the "quarrel of the ancients and moderns" from the last several centuries created a paranoia about science's domination of intellectual progress, and how all of the modernists felt that their experimentation with verse was the aesthetic answer to modern science. The popularization of the novel also shares an important part the story of modernism, seeing as Pound's statement that poetry had to now "compete" with the increasing relevance of that long prose form informs his decisions to "heave" over the iamb and strive for something less metric.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this hard to put down. When's the last time you heard that said about an academic text? Steele is a very precise writer with a real sense of forward momentum. Perhaps his writing of poetry is the reason. This is a book as much about modern art in general as poetry specifically. Such topics as poetry as experiment would appeal to anyone interested in why so much of early 20th century's art feels so astringent. The anxiety produced in poets by the rise to dominance of prose fiction in the 19th century would appeal to many beyond fans of poetry as well. Well worth the time.

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me realize that I'm a half-assed formalist poet at best.

[Cody A · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple of years ago, I wanted to learn some more about poetry. I (somewhat naively) thought that I should start this effort by reading poetry. Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite authors, so I picked up his poetry first, and loved it. Since I am American, I thought I should pick up some of the great American poets, and so I picked up The Complete Poems by Whitman. It was my first exposure to prose-poetry that did not follow meter. I was so confused and found it impossible for me to form a poetic perspective of Whitman's work that I could wrap my head around (I was told to focus on the imagery or to appreciate the "musical" quality of the prose. I couldn't). So I set it aside.

Then, a couple years later, I saw Steele's book on the shelf in a used book store and snapped it up. This book enabled me to:

1. Understand the history of "free-verse" and the aims of its proponents, and how the modern movement has failed to achieve those aims.
2. See how the premise of the free-verse movement is based on overly-aggressive interpretations of the ancient criticism of meter.
3. Learn the role that meter has played in the history of poetry, and why it is important.

While Steele is critical of the modern movement, he is not reactionary. He does not declare that free-verse can't be poetry, and all its practitioners are hacks. He is asking good questions of the movement that its adherents should not shy away from.

While there is no doubt a student of poetry will glean the most from this book, a poetic novice can learn much from Steele's accessible text.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crucial resource on form and poetics

[Ralph Rosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent account of how "free verse" became the primary form of contemporary poetry.