The book also examines the shift in Romantic aesthetics from the belief that artists objectively represent the world outside them to the belief that they subjectively express their inner feelings. Another subject of discussion is the increasing prominence in imaginative literature, in the eighteenth century and afterwards, of prose forms like the novel. Yet another topic is the sense among modern poets and artists that the physical sciences have moved into the central position in culture and that the arts should, to keep up with science, adopt its methods and become "experimental." And the book documents the way a number of leading modern poets came to feel that meter itself was inextricably bound up with the dated idioms of Victorian verse and that to break with or reform Victorian style it was also necessary to break with or reform meter. More specifically, the book observes how free verse—originally regarded by the great early modern poets as a temporary expedient to bring new life into poetry and as a challenge to poets to think freshly about their art—ramified into increasingly divergent modes and became, over the course of the twentieth century, a predominant means of poetic expression. Some reviewers of Missing Measures praised the book for its depth of historical information and analysis and considered reasonable Steele's concluding argument on behalf of preserving metrical tradition. Writing in the TLS, Clive Wilmer spoke of Steele as "a considerable scholar ... moving with ease across two-and-a-half millennia of critical thought on the subject of metre" and summarized the book as "wise and engrossing." Other reviewers interpreted Missing Measures as involving or implying a broadly and unwarrantedly negative assessment of the free verse tradition. Yet even reviewers who did not wholly share Steele's views appear to have felt that his book revealed and illuminated aspects of modern poetry that had been overlooked or insufficiently considered. Steele himself has said that he does not object to free verse--"Free verse," he maintains, "is just as much poetry as verse is"—but to the idea that it has superseded meter and rendered it obsolete. Though acknowledging he feels a special interest in metrical composition, he has insisted that his preference "is personal and aesthetic, however; I have never imagined that it provided me with access to cultural or spiritual virtue. And despite opinions to the contrary about Missing Measures, I have never said that vers libre is somehow