Philip Larkin used the image of Winston Smith's blank notebook in George Orwell's 1984 to illustrate the excitement experienced by the writer faced with an as yet unwritten text. He explains that:

the books the past has given us are printed; they are magnificent, but they are finite. Only the blank book, the manuscript book, may be the book we shall give the future. Its potentialities are endless.

This study of 'poetry in process' will compare the 'compositional practices' of three twentieth century poets in order to come closer to understanding the means by which poems are written. One conclusion which is perhaps inevitable from such a comparative study as this is that there is not a single approach to writing a poem. Each poet has idiosyncratic habits.