SOURCE: Steven, Laurence. “Purging the Fearful Ghosts of Separateness: A Study of Earle Birney's Revisions.” Canadian Poetry, no. 9 (fall/winter 1981): 1-15.

In the following essay, Steven compares revisions of Birney's poems “Transcontinental” and “Man Is a Snow.”

Certain poets display an intense concern for craft through the revisions they make to their work. W. B. Yeats, to take the obvious example, had no belief in the inviolability of the published text. His revisions are a manifestation, at the textual level, of Yeats's remarkable ability for self-rejuvenation. In Canada, Earle Birney's poetic career has a similar vitality. As with Yeats, Birney's extensive revising, which reveals developments of theme, poetic stance, and technique, is evidence that he has in no way allowed himself to calcify. George Woodcock puts it aptly when he says, “This sense that the future is always open, that nothing written is ever quite finished while its...