Quote of the Day

One of the first things I noticed was [Robert Lowell’s] revision, his revision and revision and revision and you would see the poem written over in this sort of printed handwriting, over and over the same point with slight changes and then on each piece of paper, arrows and asterisks and changes—endless changes till finally the poem didn’t have the same, wasn’t the same poem at all, didn’t mean the same thing at all. I think that was the beginning of my learning that all things are equal in poetry, all the elements that go into making a poem and that including the theme, the theme is no more important than the form.

—Peter Taylor, quoted by Kay Redfield Jamison in Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire