Incident in a Rose Garden | What is Gained and Lost
In the following essay, the author considers what is gained and what is lost in Justice’s revision of his poem.
Many reasons can dictate why writers revise
their work after it has been published: psychological
distance from subject matter, a change in aesthetics,
a belief that a poem is never finished.
Donald Justice is an inveterate reviser of his own
writing. Like Yeats, he believes that revising is a
lifelong process and that his poems can always be
better. For his Selected Poems, Justice revised a
number of poems and “Incident in a Rose Garden”
substantially. The changes Justice made, however,
effectively create a new poem.
The first version of the poem is written as a
mini-drama....
[The entire page is 1324 words long]
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