Most poets would agree that the creative process in writing goes well beyond the first draft. Although some poets (notably Billy Collins) claim to adhere to a minimal, if non-existent, editing process, many great writers often spend months to years, or even decades, editing their masterpiece poems. The importance of revision in poetry cannot be overemphasized.

Were it not for Ezra Pound watching over his shoulder, T. S. Eliot’s famous line “April is the cruelest month,” from his epic poem The Waste Land, would have been buried beneath hundreds of lines of unnecessary build-up. That is why the poem has an introductory tip of the hat, written in Italian, to his editor, that reads “For Ezra Pound: the Greater Craftsman.”

Yet there are times when the revision of famous poetry has left the literary community divided on the final products. The existence of multiple versions of poetry has plagued publishers of, to name a few, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Brodsky, and novelist James Joyce (though how could his monumental work, Finnegan’s Wake, be considered anything but prose poetry?). Dickinson’s poetry was never published in her lifetime, and standards of her time deemed that her dashes should be replaced with real punctuation, a mistake which editors have tried to rectify over the years.

Many of Brodsky’s poems were translated by multiple poets, including Brodsky himself, which often left his survivors with three or four versions of the same poem. The arguments over which editions of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are the “definitive” editions have raged for decades, and have been reignited with word that another new edition is set to be published in a few years.

There are so many steps that separate the initial idea of a poem from the published item in a magazine or book, that one might wonder how much of the poetry actually gets through the grasp of the gatekeepers––the editors and self-editors armed with red-tipped felt pens.

Click here to read “The Importance of Revision in Poetry – Part 2”

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Revision in Poetry – Part 2
2. What is Poetry?