DGR worked on the various printed stages of Poems over a period of nine months, from the galleys he first received in July 1869 to the final addition of two sonnets 26 March 1870 (the first edition appeared on 25/26 April). They are set forth below as sixteen discrete proof states, each number being assigned a date derived from DGR's letters and the proofs themselves. Earlier attempts to sort out this textual and bibliographical tangle, as John Carter called it (Carter 1972), involved arbitrary categorizations of the material into Trial Books, private issues, unique bifolia and proof sets with names such as Penkill or Exhumation or numbered series such as A1 through A4 (for details, see Lewis 102–51). The following entries provide approximate dates for each proof state and locate copies of the proofs, giving designations assigned to them by the repository holding them. The Troxell Collection at Princeton has all sixteen states, numbered and fully annotated by Robert S. Fraser in Fraser 1972: 146–75. For each state, the following tabulation provides a Fraser (F) number, but F6 has been divided into two states, the second being a revise of the first, and F12 has been omitted since it describes a mixed set of proofs from other states in the Troxell Collection rather than a discrete proof state.

The five Fitzwilliam Trial Books of Poems have now been reclassified as four sets of proofs designated A-D, although in his catalogue description of this material the librarian refers the reader to Thomas J. Wise's categorization of it as issues and fragments of Trial Books. Wise describes both the Fitzwilliam holdings and his own collection of proofs in ALC: IV: 124–26, 129–31; VIII: 171–76. Wise's copies are in the Ashley Collection of the BL, catalogued according to his own names and numbers, although finally corrected in Burnett 1999.