Timothy Steele

wurde 1948 in Burlington im amerikanischen Bundesstaat Vermont geboren. Er erhielt zahlreiche Preise, darunter ein Guggenheim Fellowship. Timothy Steele ist Professor für Englische Literatur an der California State University und lebt in Los Angeles.

Steele wehrt sich gegen das Label „Formalist“, das ihm eine übereifrige Kritik anheften will. „Das klingt, als seien Form und Inhalt Gegensätze und man müsse sich entscheiden“, sagt er. Metrum und andere über lange Zeit erprobte dichterische Techniken brächten Symmetrien und Überraschungen hervor, die es ihm erlaubten, Empfindungen und Ideen mit einer Genauigkeit wiederzugeben, die in freiem Vers nicht möglich sei.

Besonders in seinen Büchern Missing Measures und All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing hat sich Steele mit diesen Fragen auseinandergesetzt. Sein dichterisches Werk erschien unter anderem in Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 und The Color Wheel.

Timothy Steele | Website
Ohio University Press • Swallow Press

Timothy Steele Sapphics and Uncertainties Poems 1970-1986 University of Arkansas Press, 1995

Timothy Steele Toward the Winter Solstice New Poems Swallow Pr Inc 2006

Timothy Steele Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Metre Univ of Arkansas 1990

„Few poets of the twentieth century have used traditional rhyme and meter as triumphantly as Timothy Steele. His unambiguous resort to these devices in all their potential subtlety gives his work an almost Mozartian quality: there he is, located securely in the graces of his form, indubitably in there somewhere, but where? There is no need to know. His ironic, impersonal presence makes the world visible (sometimes visionary) to us. Like Whitman's grandiose Myself, Steele's and Mozart's negligible self includes everything, transforming the trivial quotidian of our suburban lives into something marvelous.“
(Richard Moore)

„The term lapidary has by now become pejorative; but Steele brings so much winning zest to his cutting of the agate that he might rehabilitate the word as a term of praise. Aside from the aesthetic pleasure his work affords, there is a controlled but powerful current of feeling in almost everything he writes ...“
(Robert B. Shaw)

„Technically, Steele is superbly commanding, offering witty and subtle rhymes that lilt just slightly at the end of carefully metrical lines ... His technical esprit, in fact, is so impressive that one may be tempted to read the poems as abstracted formal expressions. But to do so would mean missing Steele's thematic range, from satirizing urge to wistfulness and a more profound consciousness of pain ... His aesthetic is both prudent and liberating.“
(Publishers Weekly)