Thanks to the synoptic edition of Ulysses, various studies of Yeats's revisions, Valerie Eliot's edition of The Waste Land manuscript and the transcription and publication of many of Virginia Woolf's manuscripts, we now read modernist texts with some awareness of the complex processes by which they came into being. Typically, these include a formalising or tightening of structure at some stage, sometimes along musical lines. Such processes could even be seen in terms of a ‘call to order’, after what Woolf (in the course of a discussion of Joyce) described as ‘the usual smash and splinters’ (Letters ii, 598). T. S. Eliot entitled the long poems he wrote between 1935 and 1941 The Four Quartets, yet their structural model was not so much the classical quartet (which usually consists of four parts, played by four instruments), although there were four poems, but rather the work which had established his reputation – the five-part structure, with a divided second section and a short lyrical fourth section that was The Waste Land. Yet, as its manuscript notoriously reveals, that structure was in turn the outcome of Pound's judicious editing of Eliot's original drafts. Though from one point of view accidentally arrived at, this five-part structure became the model for The Four Quartets – part of the process of building an ‘oeuvre’ as if it were an architectural monument that Mallarmé had proposed. Comparable processes of revision or restructuring can be identified in the work of Yeats and Joyce who opened up new layers of meaning and significance as they worked (though Auden’s rewriting or suppression of earlier poems in the light of his own changing convictions involves a rather different conception of the relationship between the artist and his work).