Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

This book considers the creative processes of nine major Victorian poets by looking at the manuscript drafts of their poems. These drafts are often fascinating documents that reveal the creative choices, revisions, and swerves of thought as poems come into being. A careful reading of these drafts enhances our understanding of the craftsmanship and the achievement of the finished poems and gives us an intimate glimpse of the poets in the act of creation. Chapters are written by leading scholars from the UK and the US and they are illustrated with facsimiles of the manuscripts under consideration. Poets covered are Wordsworth, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Clough, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Yeats.