I always feel reassured when I see other writers’ first drafts, since they look kind of like mine–hopeless. On the other hand, Ben Jonson commented that his friend Shakespeare never revised, though readers then and now agree that sometimes he should have. We have it on no lesser an authority than Ernest Hemingway that the first draft is always shit.
Here’s a snippet of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
I think the markings are from Ezra Pound.
And here’s my first whack at a poem I now (still provisionally) call At the Institute. It’s WIP, as we used to say in business school.
Who dares compare himself to Eliot? After all, he was Modern and I’m post-Modern (I think). He was also, as they say, seminal. In the good sense.
I’m reminded of a conversation during my sophomore year at the University of Rochester. Having spent the summer immersed in D.H. Lawrence, I returned to tell my mentor, Professor George H. Ford, that I had grown a red beard so I’d look more like my literary hero. “Ah, Paul,” he said gently. “But Lawrence was a genius.”