P / Workshop · Premium · 13 November 2026

The Workshop · Tool

Every finished poem has a ghost underneath it.

Drag through a poem's versions and watch the revisions happen word by word. Then bring your own drafts and see which canonical reviser you revise like.

  • Poetry & prose
  • Revision
  • About 10 minutes
  • Free tool
Start below ↓
I wandered lonely as a cloudWhen all at once I saw a crowd,A host, ofdancingdaffodils;golden“dancing” ×3 in six lines+ 1 stanza (the milky way)laughing → jocund18071815 The Draft Scrubber Drag through a poem’s revisions, then measure your own Poetic.ly

Free to use

  • Seven documented revisions, from Keats's letter draft to Wordsworth's added stanza
  • Revision moves, measured: turnover, compression, line-end work, words moved
  • Your revision fingerprint, matched against all seven

For members · Fellowship and above

  • The revision lesson for every set: the principle, an exercise for your draft, and the scholarship behind it
  • Jakobson and Rudy on Yeats's decades of changes, Wineapple and Miller on Dickinson's editors
  • All seven revisions ranked side by side

Every finished poem has a ghost underneath it. Drag through a poem's versions and watch the revisions happen word by word: what was cut, what arrived, and how much of the first draft survives. Start with seven documented revisions, from Keats and Dickinson to Wordsworth, FitzGerald and Coleridge, or bring your own drafts and see whose revising yours resembles.

Workshop · The Draft Scrubber

Choose the drafts

Scrub through the revisions

What changed

The largest changes

    Your revision fingerprint

    Every reviser has habits: some cut, some swap, some rebuild the line endings. Choose Your drafts, paste at least two versions, and see which of the seven canonical revisions yours most resembles.

    Members · The revision lesson

    What this revision teaches

    Sources

      The comparison is word by word: words in green arrived in this version, struck words in red were cut from the one before.

      Free above this lineMembers below