Poets have often claimed that their poems were not willed but were inspired, whether by a muse or by divine visitation, or that they emerged full-blown from the poet's unconscious mind. But poets' often untidy manuscripts tell another story, suggesting that, however involuntary the origin of a poem, vision has usually been followed by revision.
Writers have described the second thoughts recorded in their working manuscripts in a number of ways. Revision may be viewed as a work of refinement and clarification, a process revealing or bringing out more vividly a meaning the author always had in mind. In this account, revision involves the perfection of an original, singular intention. But this understanding of revision has not satisfied authors who reject a notion of identity as something given and unchanging and who might be inclined to see revision as a process that makes something new. As W. B. Yeats, a compulsive reviser, wrote in 1908: 'The friends that have it I do wrong / Whenever I remake a song, /
Should know what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake.' And people besides the poet can have a hand in the process of revision. As the 'Publishing History, Censorship' section of our literary terms appendix outlines, many individuals participate in the labor that takes texts from the forms in which authors produce them to the forms in which they are presented to readers; in a similar if more limited way, revision, too, involves a range of collaborators, both institutional and personal, witting and unwitting. A revised text might, for instance, incorporate changes introduced by the amanuensis who recopies the draft so as to prepare a fair copy for the printer (a role women such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley often played in the nineteenth century?on occasion, Mary Shelley seems to have had primary responsibility for Lord Byron's punctuation). The second thoughts at stake in a revision might reflect the input of trusted advisors and editors, the poet's attempt to anticipate the response of hostile critics or readers, or (as was often the case with the revisions in which William Wordsworth and Yeats engaged) the poet's efforts to bring the political and aesthetic values of the poem into line with the changing times.
Although some earlier manuscripts have survived, it was not until the nineteenth century, when a relatively new conception of authorship as a career gained widespread acceptance, that poets' working drafts began to be preserved with any regularity. The examples from major poets that are transcribed here represent various stages in the composition of a poem, and a variety of procedures by individual poets. The selections from William Blake, Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are drafts that were written, emended, crossed out, and rewritten in the heat of first invention; while poems by William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Yeats are shown in successive stages of revision over an extended period of time. Shelley's 'O World, O Life, O Time' originated in a few key nouns, together with an abstract rhythmic pattern that was only later fleshed out with words. Still other poems?Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'; Yeats's 'The Sorrow of Love'?were subjected to radical revision long after the initial versions had been committed to print. In these examples we look on as poets (no matter how rapidly they achieve a result they are willing to let stand) carry on their inevitably tentative efforts to meet the multiple requirements of meaning, syntax, meter, sound pattern, and the constraints imposed by a chosen stanza.
Ou r transcriptions from the poets' drafts attempt to reproduce, as accurately as the change from script to print will allow, the appearance of the original manuscript page.
A1
.
A2 / POEMS IN PROCESS
A poet's first attempt at a line or phrase is reproduced in larger type, the emendations in smaller type. The line numbers in the headings that identify an excerpt are those of the final form of the complete poem, as reprinted in this anthology, above.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Autograph Poetry1 in the English Language, 2 manuscript drafts; the Cornell Wordsworth, in vols., 1973, compiled by P. J. Croft, reproduces process, reproduces, transcribes, and discusses and transcribes one or more pages of manuscript various versions of Wordsworth's poems from in the poet's ow n hand, from the fourteenth cen-the first manuscript drafts to the final publitury to the late twentieth century. Volume 1 cation in his lifetime, and the Cornell Yeats, includes William Blake and Robert Burns; vol-also in process, does the same for Yeats. The ume 2 includes many of the other poets repre-Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, under the gensented in this volume of The Norton Anthology eral editorship of Donald Reiman, reproduces of English Literature, from William Wordsworth facsimiles of Percy Shelley's manuscripts. For to Dylan Thomas. Books that discuss the pro-facsimiles and transcripts of Keats's poems, see cess of composition and revision, with examples John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, ed. from the manuscripts and printed versions of Jack Stillinger, 1990. Jon Stalhvorthy, Between poems, are Charles D. Abbott, ed., Poets at the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making, 1963, Work, 1948; Phyllis Bartlett, Poems in Process, reproduces and analyzes the sequential drafts
1951; A. F. Scott, The Poet's Craft, 1957; of a number of Yeats's major poems. Valerie George Bornstein, Poetic Remaking: The Art of Eliot has edited T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: Browning, Yeats, and Pound, 1988; and Robert A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Brinldey and Keith Hanley, eds., Romantic Revi-Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, sions, 1992. In Word for Word: A Study of 1971, while Dame Helen Gardner has tran- Authors' Alteratiotis, 1965, Wallace Hildick ana-scribed and analyzed the manuscript drafts of lyzes the composition of prose fiction as w.ell as Eliot's Four Quartets in The Composition of poems. Byron's 'Don fuan,' ed. T. G. Steffan Four Quartets, 1978. and W. W. Pratt, 4 vols., 1957, transcribes the
WILLIAM BLAKE The Tyger1
[First Draft]
The Tyger
1 Tyger Tyger burning bright In the forestl of the night What immorlal hand or eye
Aw CUil 111 Plaine |hy fearful symmetry
Burnt in
2 III WLIAI distant deeps or skies
?MIL UUU Duilll LLIU firelof thine eyes On what wings dare he aspire What the hanJ dare sieze the fire 3 And what shoi der & what art Could twist th< sinews of thy heart And when thy eart began to beat What dread hai d & what dread feet
1. These drafts have been taken from a notebook man's edition of The Notebook of William Blake used by William Blake, called the Rossetti MS (1973) contains a photographic facsimile. The because it was once owned by Dante Gabriel Ros-stanza and line numbers were written by Blake in setti, the Victorian poet and painter; David V. Erd-the manuscript.
