'It's Life Humanely Felt'

Too often I take for granted how good a poet Timothy Steele is. Uncertainties and Rest (1979), his first collection, is the work of a mature young man (he was thirty-one) and I remember being impressed that such a poetic anomaly could still be written and published when it was. His work was reassuring. Never flashy, Steele’s poems are well-made, metrically regular and meditative. Among his masters are Jonson, Frost, Auden, Cunningham and Winters. His manner is an update of the plain style – much maligned by the nineteen-seventies, when free verse had already declared a premature victory. Last week, after a friend found a copy of Steele’s edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997) in a Washington, D.C. bookstore, I returned to Steele’s early poems. 

“Three Notes Toward Definitions” is collected in Steele’s first book and consists of three sections: “Of Culture,” “Of Faith” and “Of Friendship.” The sequence begins satirically:

 

“Culture. It’s an ingredient used in making

 Pineapple yogurt, Gothic cathedrals.

 It's Isaac Newton's experiments with prisms

 Its opposite being, one supposes,

 Fried chicken TV dinners, plastic roses,

 Confessional novels brimming over

 With soul and solecisms.”

 

Steele makes it clear there’s nothing stuffy or Arnoldian about his understanding of culture. Dr. Johnson gets a passing nod and so does Billie Holiday. His tone is breezy without trivializing the subject: “Culture? It’s life humanely felt. / (See too Politeness, Mercy, Hope.)” “Of Faith” begins:

 

“A puzzling topic, this. Should be filed under

Assurance, Things Unseen, Intimations. Yet

For all of its obscurities, it is

Expressed innumerably in objects--viz.,

A pencil, a French cigarette,

Suspension bridges, drawings of the sea,

Etchings of Japanese severity.”

 

What this seemingly random catalogue implies, Steele tells us, are “convictions that our lives sustain.” Faith is like scaffolding, lending structure to life, suggesting “a certain truth”:

 

“It is the incomplete and unexplored

That often offer the most true reward.

(See Hebrews ii. I-33,

St. Augustine's Confessions, Pascal's Pensées,

Darwin’s Autobiography.)”

Steele is not a densely allusive poet, making his footnotes-in-verse even more interesting. “Of Friendship” begins “Byron considered it love without wings.” The section concludes with another, more substantial nod to Dr. Johnson, and a more mature understanding of friendship:

 

“We might (again invoking Johnson) say

That friendship offers troubles we’re inclined

To cherish. Solitude is bliss?

There’s that opinion, to be sure.

But there are ills of heart and mind

Which only companionship can cure.”

 

Steele, as a poet, makes an excellent companion. He is a model of balance in an unbalanced age:

 

“Misunderstandings, vagaries of spleen,

 

“All the minutiae of despair

 It is in spite of these one comes to share

 Experience, and sharing it, confirms

 The Other in The Other’s terms

 And not one’s own. (Consult as well Restriction,

 Patience and Love.)”