Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts ed. by Daniel Tyler (review)

Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts provides a useful collection of essays on the subject of poetic composition in the Victorian period. Daniel Tyler has brought together a number of key contributors, exploring the work of poets of both genders right across the period (starting with William Wordsworth and ending with W. B. Yeats) and offering readings of a range of poetic forms across various draft states. The rationale for the volume, as given in the introduction, is simple: to “assess the competing priorities that complicate and stimulate the making of poems” and to make the argument that “the manuscript drafts of Victorian poems require and reward careful verbal scrutiny” (26, 27). The focus is partly authorial, partly readerly: “the study of manuscript drafts enhances a reader’s appreciation of how a poem works” and gives us “an intimate glimpse of the poets in the act of creation” (2). As one would expect, the volume provides careful attention to details of draft texts on the page and detailed close readings of passages. The essays in the main body of the book are set up to explore the “competing priorities that complicate and stimulate the making of the poems” (an aspect that might perhaps have been made more focal in the introduction to give a stronger rationale for the volume) (26). These tensions involve a balance between expression and meaning (sound and sense) for poets such as Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and Algernon Swinburne; reconstruction of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s process from fragments; the relationship between unpublished and published texts for Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough; Christina Rossetti’s process of extraction; and various accounts of intertextual relationships in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Barrett Browning, and Yeats.

The essay collection opens with a reading of Wordsworth’s poem “On the Power of Sound” (1835) as a late example of an ongoing paradoxical state for the poet in terms of “the exploration of poetic occasion as experience of its loss” and a further tension between the moral value and the poetic/sound value of poetry itself (44). This first essay, by Peter Robinson, is well placed since it brings to the surface “a personal experience of more general disjunctions, ones that would also be faced by the poets that followed him into the heart of the Victorian century” (47). In the next two contributions, Herbert Tucker’s reading of Tennyson’s revisionism is itself an act of critical return and one that creates a mediated process by drawing on a printed/virtual archival collection rather than the original. Richard Cronin’s chapter is centered on critical analysis of one poet by another as he looks at Barrett Browning as mediator between Robert Browning and his readership: “uncannily alert to the complex role that Browning was inviting her to play” (83).

The fifth chapter stays with Barrett Browning but moves from her role as critic to that of a poet who “unmade what she had made” in the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). Here Kirstie Blair and Marjorie Stone adopt the concept of “contexture”—comparing the structure and situation of poems in sequence in (recently discovered) unpublished and published texts motivated by strong personal feelings of grief and loss and the need to control and order these through poetry (101). In chapter 6 Tyler explores the writ-erly Clough (externalizing his process with all its hesitations and uncertainties on the page) through a tension between instinct and impulse in writing and the “ethical problem of how to act according to one’s impulses without being too precipitous,” which seems to look back to the Wordsworth chapter at the start (126). In chapter 7 Constance W. Hassett explores Rossetti’s disciplined desire to maintain control of her writing and publication process.

The final three chapters of the book turn in a slightly different direction to consider the relationship of the writer with...