Robert Wallace (1932-1999) forged a distinguished career as a poet, teacher, editor, and prosodist. Printed here for the first time, the monograph Free Verse and the Orbit of Meter mounts a rigorous defense of his original--and still controversial--theory of prosody first outlined in the essay, "Meter in English," which begins this volume. A native Ozarker, Wallace was a prolific letter writer whose correspondents included John Updike, Dana Gioia, Donald Hall, Ted Hughes, Linda Pastan, and Mary Oliver. The volume ends with a descriptive inventory of his literary correspondence.