Poetry in the Making

The introduction to the volume proposes that composition is a dynamic process and that ideas of effortful labour and sudden inspiration are equally suggestive as ways to understand (or experience) the process of composition. The chapter argues that it is necessary to understand (and recover) the dynamics of composition, a process that is concealed when changes of mind and swerves of thought and expression, are flattened out into editorial lists of variants. The verbal adjustments to draft poems that the period’s poetic manuscripts reveal again and again, testify to the careful attention to wording by these poets in the process of composition and they demonstrate the scale of attention that the poems reward for readers and critics. This introductory chapter and the chapters that follow take up this invitation to respond to poems with careful regard for their verbal textures alongside other structural, technical and thematic qualities. This chapter offers a case and a methodology for reading draft poetic manuscripts for literary-critical ends.