“Clearly [Robinson Jeffers] did not linger over brief passages to the degree Ezra Pound might have urged him to, and he felt none of the urgency to revise and refine his work that is characteristic of modern poets as diverse as Eliot and Marianne Moore. Not that Jeffers is crude, or simple-minded, for he is not. Jeffers knew his gift and trusted his ability to give it adequate expression. “
The Sewanee Review, “A Sovereign Voice: The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers” by American essayist Robert Boyers.
My own revisions and slow and small and mostly clean up, plucking out articles, erasing to-be-to-be-dos,pruning the unnecessary phrase to collapse two lines into one and searching for the right word to replace the almost right word. Much is scraping away what comes from my start as a writer in deliberately lyrical prose essays. I have a gift or a curse, more conduit than author for poetry. I am a lapidary, cutting and polishing what nature has gifted me
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