How do you know when a poem is finished?
W.H. Auden quoted Paul Valéry - who himself was paraphrasing Leonardo da Vinci - when he said that “a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” I agree with all of them! From a purely practical perspective, however, a poem is finished when I can’t do anything more to it just then. Nonetheless I am an inveterate reviser, and although a poem has appeared in print in a journal, I may still make some revisions to it before it appears in one of my books. I even revised poems that had appeared in previous books for my new and selected, Running in Prospect Cemetery.
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