year as a book by Wallace Stevens, andnthose appearing the same year as one ofnEliot’s extremely kooky books.”nBly blames the domestication ofnpoets on the universities and the NationalnEndowment for the Arts, whichnhas enabled publishers to put out booksnof bad or indifferent verse without takingnrisks or suffering consequences. Innaddition to the “genial corruption” ofnsmall publishers paying tax-subsidizednsalaries to wives and friends, the NEA isnstunting the growth of writers who arenencouraged to rush into print beforenthey have really found their own voicenor polished a body of work that deservesnpublic attention.nBly is one of those radicals who is sonfar outside the mainstream that he oftennsounds like a reactionary (never like anliberal or conservative), and AmericannPoetry: Wildness and Domesticity is asnbrilliant as it is irritating, wonderfullynwise as often as it is simply opinionated.nDisagreeing constantly with Bly onnhis particular judgments, I am strucknover and over by his general good sensenand intransigent honesty. Why don’tnour poets write about politics, he asks.nWhy is it necessary to be a full-timenpoet, he wonders. Can’t they findnsomething better to do than report onnthe state of their feelings, day in andnday out? He had the nerve to praisenMencken and Johnson as critics, whilendeploring Harold Bloom as a literarynpromoter; he condemns John Ashberynas academic, and slyly suggests that thenM.F.A. is prized mostly by the socialclimbingnoffspring of poor immigrants.nBly appears to regard himself as onenof the last of a vanishing breed: thenwriter as revolutionary, and he repeatedlynlaments the docility of youngnpoets who refuse to rebel against himnas he rebelled against Tate and Jarrell.nThis criticism, valid as it is, needs to benqualified. There is, in fact, a revolutionn— or, more propedy a counterrevolution—nagainst the poetry establishment,nbut this neoformalist movementnto recover meter, form, and narrativenhas little or no presence on the circuitnof M.F.A. programs and writers’ workshopsnat which Bly is used to voicingnhis complaints. Among neoformalists itnis now a cliche to portray the movementnas a revolution against an entrenchednolder generation. Bly cannotnbelieve this, because he has acceptednWalt Whitman’s equation of form andn24/CHRONICLESnmeter with the feudal order.nMany neoformalists have writtenntracts and essays in defense ofnform. The most ambitious project so farnis Timothy Steele’s Missing Measures.nSteele, among the better known neoformalistnpoets, is not so much concernednwith defending meter as withndemolishing the arguments that havenbeen marshalled against it. His principalnantagonists are, inevitably, Poundnand Eliot, who insisted that modernnpoetry had to be based on the languagenand rhythms of real speech. In Steele’snview, the modernists have confusednquestions of language and dialect,nwhich are always changing, with thenformal foundation of all poetry, whichnis meter.nTo make his case, Steele examinesnthe great periods of poetic revolution:nthe ages of Euripides, Horace,nDryden, and Wordsworth. In none ofnthem, he insists, was there anythingnlike a revolution against meter andnform, only a concern with the propernlanguage of poetry. The rebellionnagainst meter, he suggests, is a byproductnof the changed status of poetrynin the 19th century. In earlier ages,nverse had been the preeminent vehiclenof imaginative writing, but some timenin the last century, fichon caught upnand surpassed poetry. Consciously ornnot, poets began to adopt views ofnrhythm that were remarkably similar tonancient discussions of prose, which wasnsupposed to display rhythms appropriatento speech, without being absolutelynmetrical.nThis is a provocative analysis, to saynthe least, and Steele argues his casenpatiently and reasonably. However, hisnbrief would be far more effective if henhad been able to establish a directnconnection between ancient rhetoriciansnand the advocates of free verse.nInstead, he contents himself with anconjecture: “One would think thatnEliot and Pound, both of whom expressednan interest in classical literature,nmight have known some of thenmaterial.” Indeed, and the scholar’snfirst task would be to determine whichnancient rhetorical treatises had beennpart of the poets’ school curriculum,nand which authors they have quoted ornmentioned. I should be very surprisednto learn that Eliot had not read Aristotie’snRhetoric, for example, and itnnnwould be a relatively simple matter forna scholar to determine. But Mr. Steele,nalthough he is an able poet and anforceful essayist, is no scholar, and hisnbook is riddled with inaccuracies andnmistakes that a well-trained dullardncould easily correct.nHis discussion of Euripides'”revolution,”nfor example, is somewhat misleading.nSteele assumes that Euripidesnwas not, like Aeschylus, a moral writer.nWhat is worse, he does not evenndiscuss the revolution in lyric form thatnis associated with Euripides and Timotheus,nand then when he leaps fromnEuripides to the Roman poet Horace,nhe entirely skips over the really importantnrevolution in Hellenistic poetry,nthe Alexandrian movement, whichnprovides the context for any seriousndiscussion of Roman poetry. Thenomission of Callimachus and the othernAlexandrians is all the more embarrassing,nsince Pound and Eliot have morenthan once been compared with Alexandriannpoets whose works combinedngreat erudition with colloquial speechn— another Alexandrian trait that is alsonfound in Horace. In noting that Horacenrecommended a pedestrian stylenbut wrote his odes in a higher style,nSteele blurs the crucial ancient distinctionsnof genre that dictated differentnstyles (even dialects), forms, meters,nand diction for different types of poetry.nA man would have to squander angood part of his life on thoroughlynlearning Greek and Latin, masteringnthe technical terminologies of metrics,nmusic, and rhetoric, plowing throughnthe enormous bibliography (all innGerman) before he could begin tonwrite about the theory and techniquenof ancient verse, and this is even beforenone could begin to contemplate theninfluence of ancient theory on Englishnverse. There may be today as many asnhalf a dozen scholars who could havenundertaken this project, and even theynwould be reluctant to assume such anburden.nOne can appreciate Mr. Steele’sndesire to touch upon these matters andneven admire his ambition. Indeed, hisnintelligent and well-intentioned booknmay prove to be the most influentialncritical work produced by the youngernneoformalists. When he puts off thentrappings of the scholar and reassumesnthe mantle of the poet-critic, he writesn