When teachers base classroom discussion of literature, particularly poetry, on the authors' manuscripts, notebooks, and letters, they allow students to watch writers write and to appreciate the craft involved in creative writing. Watching the writer at work--examining the drafts and correspondence for such poems as Blake's "London" or Keats'"To Autumn"--undercuts the intimidating authority of the anthologized work while providing concrete reasons for the final version's canonization. When students examine poetry in all its stages of creation, they begin to understand its formal and linguistic demands; as they trace a poem's progress toward completion, they develop critical methods and analytic skills for questioning literature's minute particulars. Students who watch writers write share the creator's struggles, and, present at the creation, they bask in the reflected glow of a perfected work's triumph. (Author/RL)