revision's end

It was while revising the poem you realized it wasn’t worth the effort.

nothing to work with

It was the kind of poem that didn't deserve revision. Nothing of its subject justified further effort.

poet of a certain age

He no longer made an effort to complete poems that were without an emotional impulse behind them.

snatched up

She had struggled with the poem over several years, only to have it taken in a week by the first journal she sent it to.

see attached/enclosed

Quite a number of poets are more assiduous about submitting their work for publication than expending the efforts necessary to write better poetry.

slave song

By the time you have ended labor upon your poem, to your ears it should be as though a slave song.

write it, live it

You give up too easily on literature’s power to alter lives.

simple inevitability

[In Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse”] the poet remarks that writing poetry is a thankless task, for, paradoxically, the poet’s efforts are devoted to making the finished poems seem natural and effortless. Since the best poems give no evidence of the sheer hard work that has gone into their making, they win no praise from the mass of humanity, ‘bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen’, who reserve their respect for the kind of hard work that shows.
[…]
The poem as a whole has the beautiful simplicity, the result of unobtrusive hard work, such as is mentioned within it. The colloquial vigour of the first line, for example, ensures that there is no trace of self-dramatisation here, and the language as a whole has the kind of simple inevitability that is the mark of the greatest poetry.

—Raymond Cowell, William Butler Yeats (Arco Publishing Co., 1970), p. 34-35

forced effort

For the poet, a forced effort seldom gives birth to anything but falsification. And it cannot be different for the thinker. Whatever good that was thought happened without effort. To sense the truth is the art of being still. [p. 31]

—Vilhelm Ekelund, The Second Light (North Point Press, 1986)

effortless poetry

It’s hard to get over the effrontery of a poem when obviously so little effort went into its making.