Instinct and Hesitation in the Work of Arthur Hugh Clough

The processes of composition and revision put impulse and inspiration into contact with calm reflection in a way that is continuous with the other kinds of human activity Clough describes in his poems—including Dipsychus and The Bothie—where instinct and hesitation have their competing advantages and exert their rival claims. This chapter explores the drafts of Clough’s poems, many of which were heavily revised and remained incomplete at the time of his death. It shows that revision is not solely a technical requirement for Clough; understood more broadly as an ongoing process of self-checking and self-correction, it is a moral requirement in leading a responsible, virtuous life.

The Composition and Meaning of Swinburne’s ‘Anactoria’

Because Swinburne’s ‘Anactoria’ is one of his key aesthetic manifestos, as well as one of his greatest poems, we want to get as clear a view of its composition and structure as possible. A close examination of the draft MS (at University of Texas) argues that it is missing a leaf. A comparison of that draft with a key MS page in the Fitzwilliam MS of Atalanta in Calydon argues further that the missing leaf in the draft almost certainly contained a version of the remarkable and notorious lines 155–88. Although these lines occupy the central position in the completed poem, their aggressive polemics have presented a problem for many readers. Far from unbalancing the poem’s organization, however, the passage turns out to have been pivotal from the first.

‘Not Death, but Love’

In 2009, a long-unlocated notebook—MSS, by ElizabethBBarrett—re-entered the public domain, including among its contents a sequence titled Sonnets in the night and a previously uncatalogued and unknown draft of ‘Sonnet V’ of Sonnets from the Portuguese, predating all extant manuscripts of this much studied work. The first section of this chapter (Kirstie Blair) analyses the making and unmaking of Sonnets in the night, considering its intricate ordering and EBB’s disassembling of an elegiac sequence which, if published in its notebook form, might have anticipated Tennyson’s In Memoriam in its thematic motifs (voice, song, silence, tears, work, consolation). Section II (Marjorie Stone) further analyses this unmaking in exploring the complicated relations between EBB’s elegiac sequence and Sonnet V of Sonnets from the Portuguese, arguing that composition of the amatory sequence may have begun with the tangled, turbulent draft of this pivotal sonnet, connecting smouldering grief to newly awakened love.

Christina Rossetti and the Triumph of Revision

Christina Rossetti is well known for subjecting her poems to what Jerome McGann calls ‘severe prunings’, the most conspicuous of her strategies for achieving her characteristically spare lyricism. She isolates the two stanzas of ‘Bitter for Sweet’ from a longer draft; she retrieves the two stanzas of ‘The Bourne’ from a shapeless 12-stanza poem. The extant Rossetti Notebooks, now at the Bodleian and the British Libraries, reveal intensely careful work—an adroit verbal change here, a rhythmic adjustment there—on the poems that eventually appear in Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866). For Rossetti, a manuscript ‘fair copy’ seldom remains pristine. The revisions to a poem such as ‘My Dream’ show that the deft revision that produces Rossettian understatement in her poems also produces their fine exuberance.

Yeats’s Singing-School

From the outset Yeats was a poet almost as invested in revision as he was in vision. The manuscripts show that all the early dream-laden works involved concerted labour, and indeed ‘labour’ turns out to be one of their preoccupations. In the later quasi-orientalist ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats appealed to the notion of a ‘singing-school’ for poetry based on ‘studying monuments of its own magnificence’. Like the later work, Yeats’s early poems are elaborately shaped and aesthetically developed, and the surviving manuscript drafts and revisions give us a privileged glimpse into his own ‘singing-school’ during the years he was labouring to create his voice, his characteristic self-images, and his iconography and style.

Hopkins and the Lost Beloved

This chapter examines the development of two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins: the first, ‘A Voice from the World’, was written as a response to Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Convent Threshold’ and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’. The extant fragments of Hopkins’s poem suggest his undergraduate poetic ambition to rival the Rossettis in tackling metrical and emotional complexities. The second poem examined is ‘Binsey Poplars’, which belongs to 1879, when Hopkins was a parish priest in Oxford. In it Hopkins struggles to express deep feelings about the destruction of nature, absorbing ideas from poems written by his father, R. W. Dixon, and John Clare. ‘Binsey Poplars’ is also of interest at present because a new holograph, with unique readings, has recently been purchased at auction by the Bodleian. In examining both poems, the chapter explores the concatenation of sources of inspiration and something of Hopkins’s development in handling emotional subjects.

Elizabeth Barrett and the Making of Browning’s Dramatic Romances and Lyrics

Reconstructing Robert Browning’s creative methods is a difficult task because the only manuscripts that survive, almost all at Balliol, are of late poems that even now are scarcely read. All the same, this chapter will discuss the germination of Browning’s early poems. It will rely principally on EBB’s notes on the poems that Browning went on to publish in Bells and Pomegranates VII that were brought together in the 56 page manuscript now held at Wellesley College. In the absence of surviving manuscripts this evidence offers the best clue as to Browning’s processes of revision. By examining Browning’s responses to EBB’s suggestions and the revisions he made to his poems after their first publication in periodicals I hope to show how his interest in the relationship between the poet and the reader is carried through into his compositional practice.

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.

Better Yet

The archive reveals Tennyson’s creativity as profoundly invested in openness to change, honouring the right if not the duty to differ with oneself, and cherishing the prospect of ongoing improvement. In this he was markedly Victorian. The care with which his many surviving manuscripts show him exercising such a suite of options illustrates in highly granular fashion, and across a career of 70 years, his consummate fitness to act as the laureate of a widespread reading public for whom just these issues of change and choice, writ ethically large, constituted the charter of modernity. After sampling the contents of the manuscripts and discussing several authorial acts of intervention, the chapter takes up this nexus between moral self-correction and poetic self-editing.

‘On the Power of Sound’

Published as ‘Stanzas on the Power of Sound’ in Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (1835), this later poem (subsequently called ‘On the Power of Sound’) evolved from lines composed not later than March 1828 and was revised for publication through March 1835. Reflections on the compositional processes of ‘On the Power of Sound’ draw attention to the consequences of underlying divisions in Wordsworth’s theories of poetic subjects and their treatment. His use here of flexibly rhymed variable cadences in an English Pindaric style and their capacity simultaneously to look backward and forward are considered in the light of its effort to ‘invest the material Universe’ with spirituality and ‘to exhibit its most ordinary appearances’ under a ‘moral relation’. Yet the equivocal power of the sound of the poem underlines its fundamental disjunctions between the ‘material […] ordinary’ and the spirituality of that ‘moral relation’. If this disjunction powers the poem’s laboriously lofty voice, providing its appeal to some Victorian readers, it simultaneously reveals a loss of confidence in the immanence of that relation.