Bill, Elizabeth Bishop revised "One Art" about 40 times I think. It is instructive to follow her course of bad, to good, to OK, to worse, to better, to, at last, the masterpiece.
Then there is the perseverance of the sly compulsive (Oscar Wilde, I think), who said he would spend an entire morning putting commas in sentences, and the entire afternoon taking them out. Same thing the next day. Try it; it’s fun, for a while.
The alternative to revision is to publish, perish the whole work, or Oscar Wilde the days. Battle them all.
Cheers wkg
'Tis a gift to grow, 'tis a gift to commit
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