I stumbled upon this by an extremely oblique reference1: an essay by Edgar Allan Poe, on "The Philosophy of Composition". Now if you were laboring under the impression that poetry is composed exclusively out of some sort of "divine madness" and springs forth spontaneously from the poet's soul -- well, Mr. Poe will gladly correct you.
Here he presents a sort of "behind the scenes", and uses not some academic third party textbook example, but his own famous poem, "The Raven" -- so instead of hearing some critic tell you what he thinks the author thought at such-and-such time, hear it from the author itself.
The deconstruction of the poem is quite total, and knowing how a magician performs a trick usually leads to a superbly anti-climactic 'meh' moment, so you've been warned.
Here's an abstract that conveys the general idea (emphasis mine):
no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition- that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem
- If you must know, a very brief mention (a couple of seconds), in this lecture by Gerald Sussman on the 60th birthday of Dan Friedman. ↩