Trial and Error

Trial and error is pretty much the basis for most forms of activity but as this is a site based around poetry let’s stick with the writing of a poem. I don’t know what the ratio of poets starting a new work on a computer screen or with a blank piece of paper, pencil and rubber are, but I’m of the latter persuasion. A4, Lamy mechanical 0.7 mm lead and rubber.

But, obviously, not a choice that could be made a hundred and more years ago, although I’ve just thought of typewriters. Surely not for poems?

Back to the subject. I reckon there are two methods of addressing trial and error. The first is by oneself and the second by an input from another’s perspective. With the presumption that one knows there is an error to be taken care of in the first place. Not necessarily the case.

I’m starting with Walt Whitman, one of my heroes, and his collection entitled ‘Leaves of Grass ’. He self published the first version in 1855 when it contained a mere twelve poems and then spent the rest of his life altering and expanding the collection until he died in 1892, when the collection contained over four hundred poems.

Among the poems in the early Leaves of Grass editions (albeit sometimes under different titles) were "Song of Myself", "Song of the Open Road", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". Later editions would contain Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

The only known extant manuscript page of the first edition of 'Leaves of Grass ' shows the trial and errors needed to get to this:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft.
The carpenter dresses his plank. . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, . . .

Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass revisions

For someone who looked for advice from someone else then it’s hard to escape from the influence of Ezra Pound on T S Eliot and the writing of The Wasteland.

He advised Eliot to cut the original draft of around eight hundred lines to 433 plus he told him to change the title from ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices ’ which came from a Dickens character in 'Our Mutual Friend ' who was noted for his ability to imitate the voices of the police in crime reports. Eliot thought it was brilliant. Pound insisted it was cut.

Here’s an image showing revisions made by Pound and Vivienne, Eliot’s first wife, to The Wasteland's  "On Margate Sands" stanza.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(ll. 300–02)

revisions to Eliot's On Margate Sands stanza in The Wasteland

And in the note accompanying the information it states that "After straining one of his hands rowing while at graduate school, Eliot preferred to write by using a typewriter where possible".

Pound told him to chuck an entire opening section set in a Boston saloon with stuff like:

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,
There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind,

and start with this:

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

TS Eliot and Ezra Pound

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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