Poetry in the Making Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

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.

Daniel Tyler, Fellow in English, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

Daniel Tyler is a Fellow and Lecturer in English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He specialises in British literature of the nineteenth century. He is editor of Dickens's Style (2013) and On Style in Victorian Fiction (forthcoming).

1. Poetry in the Making: Introduction, Daniel Tyler
2. 'On the Power of Sound': the 'moral music' of Wordsworth at Work in Later Life, Peter Robinson
3. Better Yet: Tennyson's Poetic Revisionism in the Harvard Manuscripts, Herbert F. Tucker
4. Elizabeth Barrett and the making of Browning's Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Richard Cronin
5. 'Not Death, but Love': The Unmaking of Sonnets in the night and the Making of Sonnets from the Portuguese, Kirstie Blair and Marjorie Stone
6. Instinct and Hesitation in the Work of Arthur Hugh Clough, Daniel Tyler
7. Christina Rossetti and the Triumph of Revision, Constance W. Hassett
8. Hopkins and the Lost Beloved: the Making of 'A Voice from the World' and 'Binsey Poplars', Catherine Phillips
9. The Composition and Meaning of Swinburne's 'Anactoria', Jerome McGann
10. Yeats's Singing-School: The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) to The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), Hugh Haughton