POETRY IN MAKING C

Poetry in the Making investigates the compositional practices of Victorian poets as made evident in the autograph manuscripts of their poems. Written in an accessible and stimulating style the book offers careful readings of individual drafts paying attention to the revisions cancellations interlineations trials of rhyme and form and sometimes the large structural changes that these documents reveal. The book shows how manuscript revisions offer insights into the creative priorities and decisions of major Victorian poets (Wordsworth Tennyson the Brownings Clough Hopkins Christina Rossetti Swinburne and Yeats); and they investigate ideas of composition in the period particularly the uneasy balance between inspiration and labour. The book testifies to the care that poets exercised at the smallest levels of their craft and demonstrates that the drafts reward an equally close attention on the part of the critic. Collectively the chapters develop a survey of how Victorian poets experienced and understood their own creativity setting abstract claims about inspiration and craftsmanship against their own practical experiences.The book responds to and extends a renewed interest in manuscript sources at the present time that has been stimulated in part by the increased availability of digital and facsimile editions. For a long time scholarly interest in nineteenth-century literary manuscripts has been dominated by editorial and theoretical concerns. This book testifies to the value for criticism of poetic drafts establishing the significance of revision and of manuscript studies for the field of Victorian poetry and for literary scholarship more generally.