The exchange of ideas, coupled with her experience of teaching humanities, broadened her view of her own area of expertise. She began to view poetry, not just in terms of theory, but as "something very much enmeshed in a cultural web." Her class "The American Grain" grew out of her expanded awareness of poetry's place in a historical and cultural context.

She designed the class, which covers the period 1776-1847, partly as a means to help her complete her latest book. Already, she knew from experience that she could be the benefactor of her students' fresh insights and questions. She has come to depend on her students to rattle her strongly held notions, to grab her ideas by the ear and give them a good shake.

Her book Made in America was the result of such student probing. The book examines the relationship of poetry to science and technology, as expressed by modernist poets Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

"I had written my dissertation on Stevens but I didn't know William Carlos Williams's work very well. My student asked, 'What did Williams think about science?' and I answered, and other students said, 'Well, look at this essay we've been reading,' and I said, 'Oh, you're quite right. That makes no sense.'"

Steinman took her student's question and explored it along many routes. She wrote a paper on the subject for a panel presented by the William Carlos Williams Review. Then she taught a class at Reed on American modernism, in which she posed the question for further examination.

"I would try out my ideas, and they would either help me expand them or occasionally shoot them down. Then I'd go back and write a chapter and then teach the material again. It goes back and forth, what I do as a researcher and critical writer, as well as a poetry writer. It always goes back to the classroom. The classroom keeps me honest and educates me."

Insights, new perspectives, and even startling discoveries are some of her rewards from raising challenging questions for class discussion. In her class "The American Grain," she came to an important realization: the War of 1812 had a profound effect on American writers of that era. After the war ended, America for the first time was free of foreign invaders.

Says Steinman, "It was actually the first moment when people knew it was going to last. With the capital in ashes, but with the promise of a stable future, the Americans set about to evaluate their past and redefine the concept of their nation. Poets participated in that. But without the class I wouldn't have asked the question: what happened to American poetry around 1815?"

Parsing American literary history in this way, with its attention to details only caught by close examination, is perhaps a special pleasure for Steinman, who spent part of her childhood in a myopic haze. Not until she was eight years old did anyone realize that she was so nearsighted that she was legally blind. Because of her facility at reading, no one suspected that beyond the pages of her treasured books, everything was a blur.

"I distinctly remember the moment when I first saw that trees had individual leaves. I always thought they were big blobs off of which shavings fell."

Although contact lenses and reading glasses correct her vision, she still feels the influence of those early years, when she blissfully retreated into her books and poems.

"It did occur to me at one point that I don't actually live very much in the visual world. I'm given to daydreaming and woolgathering, and I keep walking past people I know, even my husband." Steinman's husband, Jim Shugrue, is also an accomplished poet.

She also realized that her writing is less about documenting the world, and more about what occurs in her own imagination. What she had always loved about poems was that "they gave me some sense of how people turn the world over in their heads and reassemble it and imagine alternate possibilities and think about the things they come in contact with."