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." Critics have pointed to Yvor Winters and Cunningham as having influenced Steele's work and have noted his particular affinity with Frost. As Donald G. Sheehy says in his essay "Measure for Measure: The Frostian Classicism of Timothy Steele": "Steele recalls Frost in his subtle mastery of form, in his philosophical and aesthetic moderation, in his sympathetic but unsentimental attention to the natural world and to the vicissitudes of love and marriage, and in the gently incisive wit with which he meets human foible, public and private." In an interview in 1991 with the Los Angeles Times, Steele explained his goals in using traditional poetic structure: "Well-used meter and rhyme can create a sense of liveliness and a symmetry and surprise that can produce delight and pleasure for the reader ... I want to say something important. And I would hope the reader would be interested in it. But I also hope to give the reader pleasure." Works about versification Steele's two books on versification have attracted considerable attention. Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter examines the ideas and conditions that led many poets, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to challenge poetry's traditional principles of rhythmical organization and to develop new forms of verse without the regular units of measure that had characterized earlier verse. Among other topics, the book explores the legacy of Aristotle's dual view of poetry as, on the one hand, a rhetorical art of metrical speech and, on the other hand, a mimetic art that does not necessarily involve meter.