writes:
W. D. Snodgrass
FINDING A POEM*
In
the Introduction to his
Collected Poems,
Robert Frost
It
is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best
of it was thought of first and saved for the last....
No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
If
this is true, revision may be one of the most important creative acts;
it is certainly the creative act most easily studied.
I find that my own revisions fall into two categories. First, many
appear to be purely stylistic. I was raised, poetically, in a highly intel–
lectual atmosphere; William Empson was my first love. When one of
my poems goes bad, I almost always have to go back and write it
longer-develop, openly and extensively, ideas which I have been try–
ing to imply intensively. This does not involve changing the poem's
denotational sense, only its way of speaking. That does not mean that
such changes are unimportant; it is at least possible to argue that a
poem's style-that quality of voice which suggests qualities of mind–
that this
is
its basic meaning.
Second, however, and more immediately significant, are those re–
visions which I will call conceptual. Sometimes a poem
does
surprise
you by taking itself out of your well-meaning hands and deciding for
itself what it will say. Sometimes you find that your poem has taken you
into an area where words have resonance, where the words and images
echo through many areas of your thinking. You have approached some–
thing basic to that pattern of ideas and emotions and feelings which
is
your mind; you find out something of what
your
meaning is. Nine
*
This paper was originally delivered to a symposium on poetry at the University
of Rochester. In this symposium, three young poets-Hyam Plutzik, Richard
Collin and W.D. Snodgrass-each presented a paper on the problems in–
volved in revising one or more of his own poems.
