wrong and immoral or that meter is somehow right and pure. The experimental school of Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams has its own beauties and achievements. But we can prize them justly and build on them, it seems to me, only if we retain a knowledge and appreciation of the time-tested principles of standard versification. Free verse cannot be free, unless there is something for it to be free of." Steele's explanation of versification in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing draws from the entire range of English-language poetry since Chaucer, which Robert B. Shaw calls "indicative of an impressive breadth of learning and a lively catholicity of taste ... This book defines a notably high standard for future writers in the field to emulate." Influence Observers agree that Steele's work has influenced the development of recent American verse. Kevin Walzer wrote in 1996 in The Tennessee Quarterly, "His achievement as a poet ... is such that he differs from the mainstream far less today than when he began writing--an important marker of the range and substance of his influence. In short, he has helped to change the course of the stream." Joseph O. Aimone noted in 2003 in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Readers of poetry with a feel for formal verse can already find an interesting and gratifying wealth of invention in Steele's three volumes of poems. Those who care for explanations of versification and poetic history will find his two volumes of prose useful and readable. Those arbiters of and reporters on shifting tastes will have to take him as a reference point to orient any serious discussion of the renascent strains of traditional verse in American poetry." And Susan Clair Imbarrato commented in 2006, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, that Steele's "use of traditional forms and precise, accessible language has repositioned formal prosody into the rich palette of contemporary poetry." Bibliography Poetry Uncertainties and Rest (LSU Press, 1979) Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986) The Color Wheel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) Sapphics and Uncertainties (University of Arkansas Press, 1995) This volume reprints, in slightly revised form, Steele's first two collections. Toward the Winter Solstice (Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2006) Non-fiction Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (University of Arkansas Press, 1990) All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation