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Zachary Leader. Revision and Romantic Authorship. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. ix+354. $75.oo.
Zachary Leader's last chapter ends with the following: "The spontaneous, extemporizing, otherworldly, autonomous author, the Romantic author, is a fiction much in need of revision . . ." (3 IS). His book was written to expose or revise that fiction-and he does so by discussing the extraordinary degree to which the romantic author was engaged in revising texts, in non-spontaneous recasting of his or her words as the original idea metamorphosed from original or "primary" drafts through "secondary" alterations by way of fair copies and proofs and revisions and published texts that were then sometimes republished in different forms. Each step of this journey provided the author an opportunity to pass or alter judgment on the work, to change a word or a line or a stanza or a page or a chapter-and in the process, the authors here studied (and Leader) raise issues about creativity and identity, insisting that we distinguish creative imagination from reflective reason, the process of poetry from the product of a poem (or work of art).
Once we admit that the artist's idea falls into the limitations imposed by less-than-perfect words, we enter the world of approximation-as P. B. Shelley would have it in "To a Sky-Lark," only the ideal poet can intellectually soar and sing at the same time, having his words equal or at least sustain his ideas; for the real poet, the compositional singing limits or inhibits the inspirational soaring. Shelley develops this notion further in his "Defence of Poetry" when he compares "the mind in creation [to] a fading coal": because "the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet," it is the literary historian's task to find (and then the editor's task to publish) those poems with the most residual heat, where the words contain not only the "ashes" but also the still glowing "sparks" of "dead thoughts" that can re-illume the mind of the audience-and thereby close the circle of the fortunate fall.
It is a pity that Leader did not take up the poetry of P. B. Shelley in this study of revision-but...