D.H Lawrence's Critical Views in His Poetry

CHAPTER - III

D.H. LAWRENCE’S CRITICAL VIEWS IN HIS POETRY
D.H. Lawrence began his career of writing in his mid-twenties and the first form of literature he wrote was poetry indeed. The first collection of his poetry entitled Love Poems and Others appeared in 1913. Then two more volumes of poetry were published in 1929. It is observed that there are the accent and sweep of poetry in his novels especially in The Rainbow and
Woman in Love. Like his novels, his poetry is also personal and autobiographical. Louis Untermeyer comments on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence thus: “his poems are concerned with little else than the dark fir, the broken body, the struggle, death and resurrection of crucified flesh, the recurring cycle of fulfillment and frustration. This is D.H. Lawrence’s theme, a theme which he varied with great skill, but one which he could neither leave nor fully control. It is not merely his passion, it is his obsession.”1 (Modern British
Poetry,(New York, Harcourt, Brace and company, 1936, 360). His poems also exhibit criticism of man, life and writing in a very subtle and personal way.
Since the elements of criticism in his poems form an adequate size, there is s need to explore and it is undertaken in this chapter.
Many poets wear a mask. They are not so honest in their poetic production, for they suffer from duality. Samuel Palmer thinks but D.H.
Lawrence wears no mask. Even poets like Milton and Tennyson wore a mask.
But poets like Blake did not wear a mask. So is D.H. Lawrence’s case.
D.H. Lawrence in his Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious speaks
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of poetry as ‘pure passionate experience.’ This he calls as ‘demon.’ This demon is timeless. Blake calls this the fourfold vision the poet needs to write down
In an early letter (dated 18th August 1913) to Edward Marsh, who had objected to the rhythms of some of his poems, D.H. Lawrence wrote,
“‘…. I think, didn’t know, that my rhythms fit my mood pretty well, in the verse. And if the mood is out of joint, the rhythm often is. I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of craftsmen. That
Japanese Yone Noguchi tried it. He doesn’t quite bring it in.
Often I don’t –sometimes I do. Remember skilled verse is dead in fifty years…’”1
D.H. Lawrence thinks ‘skilled verse is dead in fifty years.’ He means that is skilled mechanical imitation of traditional verse-forms’ cannot last long.
D.H. Lawrence’s introduction to the American edition of his New Poems has mature statements of his poetic theory. In this introduction. D.H. Lawrence distinguishes between two kinds of poetry. One kind he describes as ‘the poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end.’ ‘It is,’ he writes,
“‘of the nature of all that is complete and consummate. This completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite from the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself from: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a

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dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end. Perfected bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.’”2
D.H. Lawrence speaks of the beauty of the ‘skilled verse,’ all of which he had hastily condemned in his letter to Marsh. His second kind of poetry he calls ‘poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. This is nothing but crude kind of poetry which he wrote.
D.H. Lawrence distinguishes between traditional poetry on the one hand and expressive or organic form of poetry (modern) on the other. ‘Expressive form’ is what Coleridge called ‘organic form.’ Coleridge contrasted ‘organic form’ with ‘mechanical regularity’ and wrote that it ‘is innate; it shapes, as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.’ According to D.H. Lawrence the new poetry attempts to reproduce ‘the unspeakable vibrations of the living plasm.’ When traditional form is alive, it expresses the poetic sensibility which the poet shares with his audience-in the great ages of poetry with the whole of his nation or linguistic group. In such periods traditional form is a mask which fits the poet’s face perfectly: indeed, like the mask of Lord George Hell in Max
Beerbhom’s parable, it may be said to become identical with the face. Ever since the Renaissance it has been increasingly difficult to use traditional poetic

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forms successfully. The mask tends no longer to fit the face. Hence in all
European languages in the last three hundred years we can trace the progressive loosening of poetic rhythms, the mingling or abandonment of the traditional
‘kinds’ of poetry, the movements towards free verse, the production of epic dramas and dramatic lyrics and forms that fall under none of the ancient classifications. In the twentieth century the poet is more isolated, perhaps, than he has ever been in the whole of human history. The mask, that invaluable means of communication in other ages, is now often felt to be a hindrance rather than a help to the poet.
An original poet like Blake or D.H. Lawrence solves the problems of masking by abandoning the mask altogether. He creates an organic or expressive form to express his naked, passionate experience. It may be argued that the only possible form for great poetry in the age of science is the novel or prose story, and there can be no question that D.H. Lawrence’s poetic genius finds its full expression in prose works like Rainbow, Women in Love, St Mawr and The Man Who Died. Nevertheless, his work in verse is a very important part of his literary output. D.H. Lawrence’s best poems are among the most valuable and significant in English. The Blake of Songs of Experience and the
Wordsworth of ‘Resolution and Independence’ are the prophets of this kind of poetry, which D.H. Lawrence described as ‘poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry.’
D.H. Lawrence began to write poetry when he was 19. Some of his earlier poems are “To Guilder-Roses” and “To Campions.” He had his real

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demon activated after he reached 20. He writes, “I have tried to establish a chronological order, because many of the poems are so personal that, in their fragmentary fashion, they make up a biography of an emotional and inner life.
Many of the poems, again, are what one might call fictional poems like “Love on the Farm,” “Wedding Morn,” “Two Wives,” and the dialect poems. They have no necessary chronological sequence. But the poems to Miriam, and to my Mother, and to Helen, and to the other woman, the woman of “Kisses in the
Train” and “Hands of the Betrothed,” perhaps, do the subjective poems like
‘Virgin Youth.’3 Some of the early poems like “The Wild Common” and
“Virgin Youth” were re-written, for completing the fiction. Many poems are changed too.
D.H. Lawrence left Nottinghamshire at his age of 23. That age marked his maturity in versification. His book of poems Bay appeared in 1919. He thinks a big break was apparent when he left England in 1912.
D.H. Lawrence’s early poems are autobiographical, and are written in the form that was fashionable in the England of the second decade of the twentieth century. This is the short nature poem, in rhyming verse, which the
Georgians inherited from Wordsworth and Hardy. D.H. Lawrence uses this clumsily enough, and much of the experience that lies behind these early poems lies in his early novels also. In the Introduction to his Collected Poems, he writes with a modesty that recalls that of the young Keats and he says his early poems were ‘struggling to say something which it takes a man twenty years to be able to say.’ Edward Thomas in Bookman thinks D.H. Lawrence

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does not write smoothly, sweetly and with dignity; nor does he choose subjects, such as blackbirds at sunset, which ask to be so treated. Correspondingly he writes of matters which cannot be subdued to conventional rhythm and rhymechiefly the intense thoughts, emotions, or gropings of self-conscious men or women set on edge by love or fatigue or solitude. Ezra Pound adds “The disagreeable qualities of Mr. D.H. Lawrence’s work are apparent to the most casual reader, and may be summed up in the emotion which one gets from the line of parody: ‘Her lips still mealy with the last potato.”4
What one may call the militant honesty of some contemporary poets, an urgency not only to admit their wounds but painfully to probe them, is a new thing. It is examples most signally in the work of D.H. Lawrence; for he, besides this ardor for complete expression, has an intensity of sense and spirit to express for which it is easy to find a parallel.
Rupert Brooke was as honest, and in a way as passionate, as D.H.
Lawrence. But he was far more intellectual; both his passion and his expression of it were largely the result of a reaction against intellectualism, a reaction which led him to the South Seas and Mamua and then to Lemons. D.H.
Lawrence’s reactions are personal, within himself; they do not swing him round from one point of view to another –they make him seethe so that his verse comes forth in hot and angry jets.
For he is impatient of art and, though he sometimes writes almost flawlessly as in “Brooding Grief” and ‘Snapdragon’ and the beautifully limpid
“Mystery,” he is often violent to metre and rhyme and rhythm, committing cacophonies which irritate the ear.

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Nevertheless, in spite of their shortcomings, D.H. Lawrence’s early poems are full of interest to the student of English poetry. They show us a young poet of genius, struggling with an inadequate mode of expression, like the Blake of Poetical Sketches. In them however, we can see the notable qualities which Blackmur describes admirably. The first is ‘a kind of furious underlying honesty of observation,’ and the second a religious quality, for, as
Balckmur argues, D.H. Lawrence is a religious poet. To these should be added a third quality, a mixture of tenderness and reverence. D.H. Lawrence is fearless in poetic treatment as in choice of subject. He will be exact in defining an intuition, a physical state, or an appearance due to the pathetic fallacy-herein resembling the man in ‘We have bit no forbidden apple.’ Verse aids him chiefly by allowing him to use a staccato which would be more uncomfortable in prose.
Francis Bickley thinks “Poetry, rather than prose, is true medium. D.H.
Lawrence is so subjective and so intensive that, whatever the from his writing takes, he is always essentially a lyric poet. ‘That is why his novels, powerful and beautiful as they are, are difficult to read. For there must always be a core of logical progress in narrative. Nor do the characters of his fiction ever quite disengage themselves from their maker. In Amores-- poem of loves which are not all sexual –one may find glimpses of this perfect relation of opposites; but more evident are traces of their secular antagonism.
Edward Garnett, critic and publisher’s reader met D.H. Lawrence in
1911, advised and encouraged him in his early work, but seems to have found

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The Rainbow too much a departure from traditional novel-writing. Garnet writes, “D.H. Lawrence in his two volumes, Love Poems and Others and Amores, comes today to redress the balance. As a poet he rehabilitates and sets before us, as burning lamp, passion –a word which, in the sense of ardent and tumultuous desire, has almost shed to the vulgar mind its original enrooted implication of suffering. His love poems celebrate the cry of spirit to flesh and flesh to spirit, the hunger and thrill and tumult of love’s desires in the whole whirling circle of its impetus from flame to ashes, its swift reaching out to the anguished infinity of warring nature –his love poems, I say, restore to passion the creative rapture that glows into verse of
Keats.”5
The first two qualities are well illustrated in the poem called “Love on the Farm.” This might be described as a nature poem and it certainly arises out of a keen-sighted observation of the life of nature on a Midland farm. The middle of the poem shows us a man going to kill a rabbit caught in a snare:
Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes
Hide your quaintly scarlet blushes,
Still your quick tail, lie still as dead,
Till the distance folds over his ominous tread!

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The rabbit presses back her ears
Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes
And crouches low; then with wild spring
Spurts from the terror of his oncoming…6
In this poem we are made to feel the terror of the rabbit, the large, kindly presence of the man and the woman’s identification of herself with the trapped animal. D.H. Lawrence writes,
God, I am caught in a snare!
I know not what fine wire is round my throat;
I only know I let him finger there
My pulse of life, and let him nose like a stoat
Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood.
D.H. Lawrence makes us feel the numinous quality of the closeness. The commonplace rhythms, the awkward rhymes and crudely melodramatic language help D.H. Lawrence in depicting his feelings powerfully.
The best expression of the qualities of tenderness and reverence in D.H.
Lawrence’s early poetry is seen in “Piano”:
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiled as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong

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To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.(p.
21)
The ‘piano’ poem has found its way into a number of modern anthologies, because it is an expression of sentimental nostalgia. The poem is an honest record of emotions. The feelings awakened by the song that bring back the scenes of his childhood to the poet are recognized as ‘insidious.’
“Piano” provides a complete refutation of Blackmur’s charge that D.H.
Lawrence was careless of craftsmanship in his poetry.
John Gould Fletcher, an American poet thought, “D.H. Lawrence has recently published a third volume of poetry to stand beside his Love Poems and
Amores. This event has, so far as I am aware, passed almost without notice in the English press. The reviewers of the English press know perfectly well that
Mr. D.H. Lawrence is supposed to be a dangerous man, writing too frankly on certain subjects which are politely considered taboo in good society, and therefore they do their best to prevent Mr. D.H. Lawrence from writing at all, by tacitly ignoring him. If they are driven to the admission, these selfsame reviewers are obliged grudgingly to acknowledge that Mr. D.H. Lawrence is one of the most interesting of modern writers. Such are the conditions which a

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modern writer with something new to say is obliged to accept in England today. The Press can make a great to-do about the innocuous, blameless and essentially minor poetry of Edward Thomas (to take but one example); they politely refuse to discuss the questionable, but essentially major effort of a
D.H. Lawrence.
For a fine, intolerant fanatic D.H. Lawrence undoubtedly is. That is his value for our present day, so rich in half-measures and compromises. D.H.
Lawrence does not compromise. In this last collection of poetry he gives us works which are not good poetry, which are scarcely readable prose. He includes them because they are necessary to the complete understanding of his thought and gospel. We will read them for the same reason. For D.H. Lawrence is an original thinker, and his message to our present day is a valuable message.”7 This brings D.H. Lawrence into close connection with Walt Whitman, who similarly spent his life in preaching with puritanical fervor a most unpuritan gospel. Indeed, if one examines closely D.H. Lawrence’s latest technique as shown here in such poems as “Manifesto” and “New Heaven and
Earth,” one is surprised to see how close this comes in many respects to that of earlier Whitman, the Whitman of “The Song of Myself.” For example, note the selfsame use of long, rolling, orchestral rhythm in the two following passages:
When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering,
When I went in a train, I knew it was myself traveling by my own invention,
When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own

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destruction.
When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body.
It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh.
Every kind for itself and its own, for me, mine, male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers, For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.
Look at Whitman’s “Song of Myself” for comparison:
I celebrate myself and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.8
According to Fletcher,
“The difference is that D.H. Lawrence is more delicate, more sensitive, more personal. He deliberately narrows his range, to embrace only life and his own life in particular. Unlike
Whitman, he has a horror of the infinite, and I am sure that he could never bring himself to ‘utter the word Democracy, the word en-masse.’ He is an aristocrat, an individualist, and indeed, he has only a horror of the collective mass of mankind, which he sees to have been always conservative,

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conventional, timid, and persecutors of genius. In fact, the only similarity is, that both he and Whitman are preachers of new gospels, and therefore are obliged to adopt a similar tone of oratory in their work.”9
D.H. Lawrence wrote that many of his poems were so personal that, in their fragmentary fashion, they make up a biography of an emotional and inner life. Actually, like Byron, he was a poet who could only reach his full maturity when he had got rid of the autobiographical preoccupation. The last phase of his autobiographical poetry is to be found in the famous sequence Look! We
Have Come Through! which is at once a kind of poetical record of his early married life. It is an attempt to give expression to the drama of the psychological relationship between a newly-married husband and wife. This is a great subject and the sequence is certainly a psychological and autobiographical record. Amy Lowell, the American Imagist poet is said to have thought that the sequence ‘made up a great novel, greater even than Sons and Lovers.’
Conrad Aiken adds,
“D.H. Lawrence’s temperament is modern to a degree, morbidly self-conscious, sex-crucified, an affair of stretched and twanging nerves. He belongs of course to the psychological wing of modern poetry. Although we first met him as an Imagist, it is rather with T. S. Eliot, or Masters, or the much gentler Robinson, all of whom are in a sense lineal

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descendants of the Meredith of Modern Love, that he belongs.
But he does not much resemble any of these. His range is extremely narrow—it is nearly always erotic, febrile, and sultry at the lower end, plangently philosophic at the upper.”10
One observes that he knows this himself; he asks the reader of Look! We
Have Come Through! to consider it not as a collection of short poems, but as a sort of novel in verse. No great rearrangement, perhaps, would have been necessary to do the same thing for New Poems or Amores, though perhaps not so cogently. More than most poets he makes of his poetry a sequential, though somewhat disjointed, autobiography.
These poems start a new cycle, in the sense that they belong to D.H.
Lawrence’s foreign experience. D.H. Lawrence thinks, ‘The best poetry, when it is at all personal, needs the penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance to make it full and whole.’
Then D.H. Lawrence was seeking an escape from the conventional rhythms of early twentieth-century English poetry, which were hampering his poetic expression. The logical outcome of the search for expressive form, as far as metre is concerned, was a kind of free verse. He was looking for a sort of verse in which he could make the individual quality of his voice felt and heard.
His immediate guides in the period 1914-16 were the Italian Futurists, the
Anglo-American Imagist group of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, and Walt
Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass had been ‘one of his great books’ since the
Eastwood days. D.H. Lawrence writes of Whitman in high terms in his Studies in Classic American Literature. He hails him as a master and liberator of verse and in “Poetry of the Present” he praises him.
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D.H. Lawrence once read Paolo Buzzi’s essay on free verse, and, in
Buzzi’s poems and others he found a kind of free verse which combined, lyricism with conversational ease, tough-minded directness of speech and freedom from traditional poeticism. The Futurists helped him to escape from the vague romanticism, the excessively literary diction, and the saccharine rhythms of the Georgians. D.H. Lawrence was far too big a man to be absorbed by the Futurists, the Imagists or any other literary clique. Whitman was another matter and D.H. Lawrence was both attracted and repelled by him.
However, Whitman showed D.H. Lawrence how to use large, free rhythms based on those of common speech yet filled with a music which is not to be found in common speech; but he also encouraged D.H. Lawrence’s tendency to preach and orate, to talk about experience rather than express experience. The famous culminating poems in Look! We Have Come Through!‘New Heaven and New Earth,’ “Elysium” and “Manifesto” – contain many examples of the bad, undigested influence of Whitman on D.H. Lawrence.
Sir Herbert Read thinks in these poems D.H. Lawrence is expressing a wish for a wonder to happen in these poems. The best poetry in Look! We Have
Come Through! is certainly in the lyrics. Such a poem as “A Doe at Evening” shows how the Imagists helped him to ‘strip off the tinsel’:
As I went through the marshes a doe sprang out of the corn and flashed up the hill-side leaving her fawn.

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On the sky-line she moved round to watch, she pricked a fine black blotch on the sky (p. 73).
D.H. Lawrence’s boyhood friend Jessie Chambers in her memoir wrote that ‘a living vibration passed between D.H. Lawrence and ‘wild things.’ At last, D.H. Lawrence found a sort of verse that has made us feel that vibration.’
“Manifesto,” an effort to explain the author’s sexual philosophy, seems to contain more confusion, mingled with commonplace ideas, than the other metaphysical poems, and to have fewer flashes of illumination. But as a statement of some of the cardinal points in Mr. D.H. Lawrence’s belief, some passages in it have an obvious interest and value. D.H. Lawrence writes in
“Manifesto”:
Let them praise desire who will, but only fulfillment will do, real fulfillment, nothing short, it is our ratification, our heaven, as a matter of fact,
Immortality, the heaven, is only a projection of this strange but actual fulfillment, here in the flesh.(p. 265)
Many mystics have tried to deny sex altogether, but Mr. D.H. Lawrence sees in the bodily union of men and women the central mystery of human life, a mystery indissolubly connected with every real religious impulse of mankind, a symbol of an ultimate spiritual consummation.

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Perhaps the most profound and moving poem in this volume is the last one, “Craving for Spring.” It is a passionate appeal to Life not to forsake the frozen and corrupt world, not to leave it under the dominion of Death:
Come quickly, and vindicate us against too much death.
Come quickly, and stir the rotten globe of the world from within, burst it with germination, with world anew.
Come now, to us, your adherents, who cannot flower from the ice.
All the world gleams with the lilies of Death the Unconquerable, but come, give us our turn.
Enough of the virgins and lilies, of passionate, suffocating perfume of corruption. no more narcissus perfume, lily harlots, the blades of sensation piercing the flesh to blossom of death.
Have done, have done with this shuddering, delicious business of thrilling ruin in the flesh, of pungent passion, of rare, death-edged ecstasy.
Give us our turn, give us a chance, let our hour strike,
O soon, soon!
Let the darkness turn violet with rich dawn.
Let the darkness be warmed, warmed through to a ruddy violet, incipient purpling towards summer in the world of the heart of man (CP, p. 273)11.
There are people, perhaps, to whom the passage quoted above, and indeed the whole poem, may sound like the vapourings of a madman. To others it will sound like a kind of material music of the soul, filling them with strange fervors and longing.

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When Mr. D.H. Lawrence drops the cloak of the seer and squeezes his individuality into the confines of more or less ‘ordinary’ verse, he moves about with a power and confidence which few of his contemporaries can equal. He comes down from metaphysics into the art of poetry, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ and seems to see all the visible world with freshened eyes, and as if for the first time. Nature reveals her secret to him as she has done to few poets and those only the most cherished. When he uses more or less conventional metres-as in the “Hymn to Priapus,” in “A Youth Mowing,” “Giorno dei Morti,” “Sunday
Afternoon in Italy,” and the wonderful “Ballad of a Wilful Woman” he gives them always a personal, unconventional twist, and evolves a new, strange and beautiful music. The following verses from the “Ballad of a Wilful Woman” will serve to illustrate his use of metre:
While Joseph pitches the sleep-tent
She goes far down to the shore
To where a man in a heaving boat
Waits with a lifted oar.
They dwelt in huge, hoarse sea-cave
And looked far down the dark
Where an archway torn and glittering
Shone like a huge sea-spark.
He said: ‘Do you see the spirits
Crowding the bright doorway?’
He said: ‘Do you hear them whispering?’
He said: ‘Do you catch what they say?’(CP, p. 201).

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And in the piece called “The Sea,” Mr. D.H. Lawrence shows once again-as he showed in The Trespasser and in several of his other books –that he understands the sea as truly as the greatest of his country’s poets, and that he feels for it something which only Englishmen seem to have been able to express. The whole volume Look! We Have Come Through! is full of brief, vivid, unforgettable pictures and images.
According to Louis Untermeyer the smouldering volume Look! We
Have Come Through! is particularly pathetic and illuminating example-even the title is a passionate and despairing wish-fulfillment. Douglas Goldring observes, “The poems at the end of Look! We Have Come Through! called
“New Heaven and Earth,” “Elysium,” “Manifesto,” and “Craving for Spring,” contain alternately passages of great sublimity which do indeed open windows in the mind, and passages of mere confusion.”12
“A Doe at Evening” points the way to D.H. Lawrence’s mature poetic achievements of his middle years in Birds, Beasts and Flowers.
The poems of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers were begun in Tuscany, in the autumn of 1920, and finished in New Mexico in 1923, in D.H. Lawrence’s thirty-eighth year. So that from first to last these poems cover twenty years.
There often seem to be two people in D.H. Lawrence, the writer, individual as he is upon the whole. One is a subtly creative artist of vision who makes us see things by his fine and deep perceptions; the other is a subject of vehement, instinctive feelings, for which he is trying to shape a coherent expression and even, however he disliked the word, a philosophy. The two sides are definite

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and arresting in his prose, while his verse, as might be expected, shows more oneness of emotion. To read Love Poems and Others, written ten years ago and now reprinted, is to feel this impression confirmed. But until the new book
Birds, Beasts and Flowers, readers have had no verse from him since his prose struck out new lines; and the point may be worth noticing because his changes have been more than changes of technique.
Poetry was part of D.H. Lawrence’s life from his very earliest years.
Nonconformist hymns, as we have seen, were an important influence in shaping his consciousness –more so, he confesses, even than those
“poems which have meant most to me, like Wrodsworth’s
“Ode to Immortality” and Keat’s odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe’s lyrics…- all these lovely poems which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man’s consciousness.”13
Much of his early reading, too, had been of poetry-Shakespeare, Blake,
Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and
Lyrics. He also taught poetry as part of his duties in Croydon, as his headmaster at the time recalled in 1951. The headmaster is said to have spoken the following: “D.H. Lawrence’s choice of verse for class study was, for the time, unorthodox. He would have none of the ‘We are seven etc’ category. Nor would he tolerate any with what he called ‘a sniff of moral imposition.’ I found entered in his records such selections as ‘The Assyrian Came Down,’ (Byron),
‘The Bells of Shandon’ (Mahony), ‘Go fetch to me a pint of wine’ (Burns). He

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considered that the best approach to poetry for young people was through rhythm and the ring of words rather than the evasive appeal of an unreal and abstract morality.”14
It is said all three of D.H. Lawrence poems first published by Ford were written in Croydon. “Dream Old and Nascent” and “Discipline” both concern classroom teaching, and “Baby Movements” was about the new daughter of his
Croydon landlady Mrs Marie Jones. But it was not until his contact with
Edward Marsh in the autumn of 1912 that D.H. Lawrence was obliged to enter into debate about the nature of poetry, and to justify his own practice.
D.H. Lawrence’s work will always be read as peculiarly his own, as uniquely ‘Lawrentian’ but the close examination of his language reveals something of the means by which that uniqueness was achieved and the integrity with which it was followed.
In Croyden D.H. Lawrence found a new theme freed him from the trammels of autobiography. It was a subject-matter that he was particularly well qualified to treat: the immediate apprehension of the flux of life, especially of sexual life, in non-human organisms. What we notice painfully is that D.H. Lawrence was then fed up of his affairs with human beings and he turned to birds and beasts, because they did not ill-treat him. He became a humanitarian. In his Preface to The Grand Inquisitor, D.H. Lawrence wrote that ‘… life is the great reality… true living fills us with vivid life, the
‘heavenly bread.’

Here he carries forward the work of the great Romantics,

especially that of Wordsworth, in the exploration of what may be called the

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divine otherness of non-human life. The Romantics neglected the animal world and the sexual element in nature, and tended to confuse the apprehension of the life of nature with the quiet contemplation of landscape. D.H. Lawrence aims to a mote complete nature poetry which includes birds, beasts, fishes, insects and vegetable life.
This book and the laconic titles of its poems—“Fig,” “Mosquito,”
“Elephant,” and soon-seem to announce very simply a record of visible things.
The blank, free verse in which it is all written suggests an enumeration of what he happens to find. It has a fairly definite and persisting cadence, as well as changes of tone, and it might be called an effective poetic equivalent of Mr.
D.H. Lawrence’s prose rhythms. See for example, the poem “Mountain Lion”:
And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans And never miss them
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of the slim yellow mountain lion!(CP, p. 402).
This poetry, like all, is very soon found to go far beyond simple perceptions. It is not a question of feelings merely, but of the kind of vision. So is the poem “Sicilian Cyclamens:”
Dawn-rose
Sub-delighted, stone-engendered
Cyclamens, young cyclamens

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Arching
Waking, pricking their ears
Like delicate very-young greyhound bitches
Half-yawning at the open, inexperienced
Vista of day,
Folding back their soundless petalled ears.
Greyhound bitches
Bending their rosy muzzles pensive down,
And breathing soft, unwilling to wake to the new day
Yet sub-delighted (CP, p. 311)
Whether that has more of intuition or fantasy, it shows Mr. D.H.
Lawrence’s power of giving back the visible in an image. The poems draw another strain. The wit and humor which have appeared in his prose are indulged freely; he is amusing, mocking, and at times decidedly sardonic –at the expense of men rather than nature.

All these strains come out with his

tortoises, which have so much engaged, Mr. D.H. Lawrence’s attention that he devotes a little cycle of poems to them, making such a portrait of the lonely reptiles as can never have been given in verse before. “Lui et Elle,” a singular glimpse of the conjugal relations of the parent, huge female and lesser male, ends thus:
She seems earthily apathetic,
And he has a reptile’s awful persistence.

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I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mere Tortue.
While I, I pity Monsieur.
‘He pesters her and torments her,’ said the woman
How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I.
What can he do?
He is dumb, he is visionless,
Conceptionless.
His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not
As her earthen mound moves on,
But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin,
Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,
And drags at these with his beak,
Drags and drags and bites,
While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along (CP, pp. 361-62).
D.H. Lawrence’s championship of the male and his reading of the sexual moment in the poem which follows are both characteristic. He has lit up in this book the deeps and the sharp edge of instinct: the strangeness of nature, and yet the commensalism of men and things.
The tone is comprehensive, ranging from a physical intensity of passion and the poignant mixture of sensation, pity and emotion in “Cruelty and Love” to the airy magic of “Kisses in a Train” and the pure melody of “Song-Day in
Autumn.” The dialect poems and his “Schoolmaster” show versatility without loss of power. Throughout the book that deep-drawn sense which D.H.

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Lawrence has of the vital rhythm in man and nature is at the core of his poetry.
He can show men instinctively as fragments of nature:
You who are twisted in grief like crumpling beech-leaves,
Who curl in sleep like kittens, who mass as a swarm
Of bees that vibrate with revolt; who fall to earth
And rot like a bean-pod; what are you, oh multiform?(CP, p. 73).
According to Edwin Muir D.H. Lawrence lacks both poetic ingenuity and skill for versification. He writes, “It is simply one thing, said over and over again, and always with less point, and always without knowing that it has already been said. This is the penalty which D.H. Lawrence must pay for his lack of artistic sincerity.
Or rather it is one of the penalties, for his lack of conscience lays him open to other artistic vices, unsuspected by himself.
Let us see the poem “Fish”:
No fingers, no hands and feet, no lips;
No tender muzzles,
No wistful bellies,
No lions of desire,
None (CP, p. 335)
Faults so great as these would be of no importance in a bad book; they are significant only because the book is very good, showing genius in eruption on almost every page. It is true, men will always prefer genius at rest rather than in violent commotion, just as necessarily they prefer form to chaos; but genius in any form whatever is eventually salutary, and even should D.H.
Lawrence lose himself-one sincerely hopes he will not-- he will not be lost to mankind.”15 268

Critics think Birds, Beasts and Flowers is an extremely varied and uneven collection. There are poems in it that may fairly be described as representing tortured states of mind, and passages that, perhaps, deserve the epithet ‘hysterical.’ Too often D.H. Lawrence succumbs to the worst part of
Whitman’s influence and mistakes strident statement for poetic expression.
Such an affirmation is to be found in D.H. Lawrence’s famous poem
“Snake.” This poem is based on that complete truthfulness to the facts of common experience that D.H. Lawrence shares with Wordsworth and Hardy, but here the common experience is transformed and invested with mythical grandeur. This is a rare and memorable achievement. Wordsworth had something similar in “Resolution and Independence,” where the commonplace meeting with the old leech-gatherer is transmuted into myth of overwhelming majesty. The old man, while remaining a poor leech-gatherer, is seen at the same time as a gigantic natural force and the embodiment of transcendental strength and majesty. See for example,
Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead,
Nor all asleep—in his extreme old age:
His body was bent double, feet and head
Coming together in life’s pilgrimage;
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage
Of sickness felt by him in times long past,
A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.16
Similarly, D.H. Lawrence’s snake which D.H. Lawrence saw one hot morning drinking in his water-trough at Taormina (in Mexico) remains, in the poem, an ordinary ‘earth-brown, earth-golden’ Sicilian snake, but at the same time becomes a mythical, godlike lord of the underworld, an embodiment of all
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those dark mysterious forces of nature which man fears and neglects. Look at it: Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honored?
I felt so honored.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honored still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black;
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face…(p. 137)
There is no empty rhetoric here. The style is very simple, the diction colloquial, and the word order that of common speech. But the effect is grand and dignified. D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” is a triumph of style and idiom, one of the very few English poems in free verse where perception is embodied in rhythms that are an essential part of the poem’s meaning.

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There are other triumphs of a different kind in Birds, Beasts and
Flowers. Such a poem is “Almond Blossom,” a hymn to the miracle of renewed life as revealed in the blossoming of the almond tree:
… the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds, unfolds,
Pearls itself into tenderness of bud
And in a great and sacred forthcoming steps forth, steps out in one stride
A naked tree of blossom, like a bridegroom bathing in dew, divested of cover, Frail-naked, utterly uncovered
To the green night-baying of the dog-star, snow-edged wind
And January’s loud-seeming sun.
There is wit here, too, as well as magnificence. The image of the ‘dog star’ is a conceit at once witty and imaginative, worthy of the seventeenthcentury masters, Donne and Marvell. As Mr. Alvarez has written in his admirable study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry, this kind of wit is ‘not a sparkle on top of intelligence; it is a manifestation of intelligence.’
D.H. Lawrence wrote many books of poetry after the volume Birds,
Beasts and Flowers. He published books like Pansies (1928), Nettle and More
Pansies (1929), and Last Poems (1929).
Pansies is more important of these later volumes.
D.H. Lawrence, like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, attacks the barbarous and the absurd of the modern civilization. He attacks everything in modern life which deprives man of his animal delights and checks the noble

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and beautiful savage. And yet we hesitate to say that it is the noble savage whom Mr. D.H. Lawrence exalts.
Anyhow the Tolstoyan lot simply asked for extinction:
Eat me up, dear peasant! – So the peasant ate him.
And the Dostoevsky lot wallowed in the thought:
Let me sin my way to Jesus! – So they sinned themselves off the face of the earth.
And the Tchekov lot: I’m too weak and lovable to live!
So they went.
Now the proustian lot: Dear darling death, let me wriggle my way towards you like the worm I am! – So he wriggled and got there.
Finally our little lot: I don’t want to die, but by Jingo if I do!
-Well, it won’t matter so very much, either (CP, pp. 533-34).
D.H. Lawrence’s hatred becomes uncontrollable when he thinks of money:
Old money-worms, young money-worms money-worm professors spinning a glamour round money, and clergymen lifting a bank-book to bless us!
In the odour of lucrative sanctity stand they – and god, how they stink! (CP, pp. 456-457).
D.H. Lawrence calls money muck, and he actually feels the same sharply physical and lingering disgust of it that Swift felt of real muck. But real muck D.H. Lawrence would probably not abhor, and it seems to be only the

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disguises of it that he cannot abide. Money, machines, the middle classes and industrial amusements stink alike in D.H. Lawrence’s nostrils. D.H. Lawrence is a master of the pathetic, and the lines are written in the little language of
Swift. But the last line has not yet been quoted; and the revulsion of hatred is the more violent since it comes with so crushing an emphasis immediately after a tender appeal ‘And would you peck out his eyes if he did?’ These pansies and passions of hatred directed against the lilies and languors of virtue are called pansies because, as D.H. Lawrence tells us, ‘they are rather pensees than anything else,’ and he wishes them to be taken as ‘casual thoughts that are true while they are true, and irrelevant when the mood and circumstance changes.’
They are not written in prose because ‘there is a didactic element about prose thoughts which makes them repellent, slightly bullying.’ Certainly D.H.
Lawrence’s thoughts are not bullying, for here are few things so consolatory in some moods as a comprehensive dislike of most things; but neither are they, as he wishes them to be, exactly like flowers, ‘merely the breath of the moment and one eternal moment easily contradicting the next eternal moment.’ D.H.
Lawrence sings, and sums up the purposes of his poetry. But to what are we to scramble back? It is in describing this desired territory that D.H. Lawrence becomes most a poet and can best exercise his concrete and physical metaphors. I don’t want to be poor, it means I am pinched.
But either do I want to be rich.
When I look at this pine-tree near the sea, that grows out of rock, and plumes forth, plumes forth,
I see it has a natural abundance (CP, p. 498).

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According to Mark Van Doren, D.H. Lawrence’s title is his way of saying that here at last he has set down his opinions nakedly in verse. He writes, “For Pansies means ‘Pensees’- these are the straight thoughts of D.H. Lawrence concerning subjects which he has hitherto treated either in novels or in psycho-analytical discourse or in long and relatively indirect poems. All these other methods, indeed, were indirect, now he pursues the quite simple method of epigram and image, of statement and idea. Not that he claims completeness for the present result or expects to stand by these particular propositions forever. They are only pansies after all, not immortelles.”17
Doren thinks many of the poems, if such they may be called, are distressingly flat. We could have gone anywhere else, for instance, and been told that
There is no point in work unless it absorbs you like an absorbing game. or That society must establish itself upon a different principle from the one we’ve got now(p. 610).
But it is not in such passages that D.H. Lawrence speaks characteristically. When he has all his faculties about him, his wit and anger, his sense of absurdity and his conviction of the truth, he makes such significant
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observations as the following:
Elephants in the circus have aeons of weariness round their eyes.
Yet they sit up and show vast bellies to the children.
Or he breaks out in this really noble and at the same time humorous way against professional pacifism. Pansies has many such pieces in it; one remembers them, if only to read with the amusement to one’s friends. D.H.
Lawrence is quite right in saying that Pansies should not be taken too seriously, for if it is not so taken it turns out to one of the sincerest books which D.H.
Lawrence has written.
The poems that D.H. Lawrence wrote at the end of his life have a peculiar quality of freshness and directness. The Whitmanseque rhetoric and the ‘ritual frenzy’ that some critics condemn have now disappeared. There is the voice of a very wise man who loves life, but is saddened and embittered at the way in which it is being fouled and violated by mass civilization. This voice is that of a seer with a majestic vision of God and life and earth. The two voices, to quote Professor Hoggarth again:
‘at bottom are… one voice … each reinforces and makes valid the other. We trust the visionary more because it’s rooted in the solid and down-to-earth. We know that the down-to-earth is a genuine rootedness, not a cynicism, because the visionary can grow out of it.’18

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In D.H. Lawrence’s later poems one gets the impression of a man who, like the Byron of Don Juan, is able to speak out his whole mind in verse with complete ease. Many of his poems are brilliant and incisive satiric commentaries on Western civilization, like the poem “Wages”:
The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is-the world we live in.
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle that ever turned men into friends.
Earning a wage is a prison occupation and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.
Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job, a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.
Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison
In terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers almost every scarp of the living earth, you stroll up and down on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.
This is called universal freedom (p. 208).
This ‘wage’ poem has the quality of satire. It is witty, humorous and profoundly serious. The image of the gaol is the perfect symbol for industrial society. D.H. Lawrence has written many such poems.
Blake would have delighted in D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Modern
Prayer,” surely a prophecy of the affluent of the nineteen-sixties:

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Almighty Mammon, make me rich!
Make me rich quickly, with never a hitch in my fine prosperity! Kick those in the ditch who hinder me, Mammon, great son of a bitch! (p. 222).
In the poems that D.H. Lawrence wrote at the end of his life his preoccupation is no longer with the flux of life but with God and death.
Christopher Hassall draws attention to the close connection between D.H.
Lawrence’s Last Poems and his study of the remains of ancient Etruscan civilization which produced the last, and perhaps the most beautiful, of his travel books, Etruscan Places. Hassall thinks these poems are on a theme of literary criticism. D.H. Lawrence writes concerning the Etruscan paintings which can be applied to his own poetic art in its final development:
“The subtlety of Etruscan painting, as of Chinese and Hindu, lies in the wonderfully suggestive edge of the figures. It is not outlined. It is not what we call ‘drawing.’ It is the flowing contour where the body suddenly leaves off, upon the atmosphere.’”19 D.H. Lawrence’s Last Poems are religious poems and the religion which lies behind them is that primitive religion of wonder which D.H. Lawrence ascribed to the Etruscans and to the native Indians in Mexico. For D.H.
Lawrence as for the Etruscan and the early pre-Socratic Greek of whom he read in two of his favorite books, John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy and Gilbert
Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion, there was no contradiction between belief in God and belief in the gods. In his Last Poems God is sometimes the creative urge in nature.
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“Bavarian Gentians,” is the greatest of D.H. Lawrence’s mythological poems. The immediate suggestion for this poem seems to have come from gentians which he saw in Bavaria, Germany where he was staying in 1929, just before he left for the South of France, where he died in the following March,
1930. The sight of the dark blue flowers seems to have evoked the memory of his exploration of the Etruscan tombs in 1927. As Hassall has written: “Even the physical act of entering these tombs… had become for D.H. Lawrence a symbol of death with that noble lack of bitterness or protest which is so lovely element in his last poems.’”20 Here D.H. Lawrence writes,
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom (p. 245).
D.H. Lawrence does not, as in his early poems, try to give the reader an immediate apprehension of the life of the flowers; he uses them mythological, turning them into miraculous torches from the halls of Dis, lighting us down stairs that lead to the underworld. In the tomb of an Etruscan prince, D.H.
Lawrence tells us in Etruscan Places, he saw ‘the sacred treasures of the dead, the little bronze ship of death that should bear him over to the other world, the vases of jewels for his arraying, the vases of small dishes, the little bronze

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statuettes and tools, the armour… This ‘little bronze ship of death’ became the central image of the longest and most ambitious of the last poems ‘The Ship of
Death,’ on which he was working as he lay dying in the opening months of
1930 in the South of France. T. Moore and Warren Roberts, calls this ‘a remarkable poem.’21
It is the final triumph of D.H. Lawrence’s poetic art, combining a wonderful grandeur and tranquility with that ‘free –breasted naturalness and spontaneity.’ D.H. Lawrence writes,
O build your ship of death, your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion
*

*

*

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey
A little ship, with oars and food and little dishes, and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul.
D.H. Lawrence’s vision of resurrection is explicit in the end:
Wait, wait, the little ship drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey of a flood-dawn.
Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.
A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.
*

*

*

*

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The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing on the pink flood, and the frail soul steps out, into her house again filling the heart with peace (pp. 255-256)
V. de. S. Pinto observes,
“In his poetry we must look for ‘the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment,’ a poetry that is ‘neither star nor pearl but instantaneous like plasm.’ To convey this sort of experience with the greatest delicacy, the finest intelligence and the most complete honesty was his aim, and, after many unsuccessful and partly successful efforts, he achieved it in such poems as
“Snake,” “Almond Blossom,” “Bavarian Gentians” and “The
Ship of Death.” Like Wordsworth he wrote a good deal of bad poetry, but, like Wordsworth’s even his bad poems are important, because they are the experiments of a major poet grouping his way towards the discovery of a new kind of poetic art.”22
Douglas Goldring adds,
“But how thankful we should be for the achievement of this lonely genius! Even when his verse is most chaotic, even when he most fails to set free his own thought and his poetry most nearly resembles ‘a disarray of falling stars,’ the sparks from the furnace of his inspiration retain sufficient heat to enable them to set fire to the minds on which they fall.”23
At the end of the chapter: The methods used by D.H. Lawrence in the criticism in his poetry are extravagant, exacerbated and yet are vitally his own.
Therefore it is creative.
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References:
1. D.H. Lawrence, qt by V. de. S. Pinto, Introduction to D.H. Lawrence:
Complete Poems, Penguin, London, 191928, p. 2.
2. D.H. Lawrence, qt by V. de. S. Pinto, Introduction to D.H. Lawrence:
Complete Poems, p. 3.
3. D.H. Lawrence, Preface to Collected Poems, Penguin, London, 1928, p.
27.
4. Ezra Pound, Review of D.H. Lawrence’s Love Poems and Others, New
Freewoman, London, 1913, p. 1.
5. Edward Garnet, “Art and the Moralists: D.H. Lawrence’s Work,” Dial,
New York, 1916, p. 377.
6. D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, Penguin, London, 1970, p. 42.
7. John Gould Fletcher, Review of Look! We Have Come Through!”
Poetry, Chicago, 1918, xii, p. 274.
8. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” The American Tradition in
Literature, ed by Sculley Bradley and others, Random House, New
York, 1981, p. 895.
9. John Gould Fletcher, Review of Look! We Have Come Through!”
Poetry, p. 275.
10. Conrad Aiken, Dial, New York, 1919, lxvii, p. 97.
11. D.H. Lawrence’s poems with ‘CP’ are from his Collected Poems, with an Introduction by V. de S. Pinto, Penguin, London, 1945.

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12. Douglas Goldring, “The Later Work of D.H. Lawrence,” Reputations,
Chapman and Hall, London, 1920, p. 68.
13. D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix II, p. 597.
14. Edward Nehls, D.H. Lawrence, A Composite Biography, Wisconsin,
1957-9, pp. 87-8.
15. Edwin Muir, “D.H. Lawrence,” Nation, New York, 1925, cxx, p. 148.
16. William Wordsworth, qt from The Top 500 Poems, ed by Willaim
Harmon, Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1992, p. 423.
17. Mark Van Doren, “D.H. Lawrence’s Pansies,” New York Herald
Tribune Books, New York, 1929, p. 15.
18. Richard Hogarth, “Poems of D.H. Lawrence,” broadcast from BBC in
1961.
19. D.H. Lawrence, qt by by V. de. S. Pinto, Introduction to D.H.
Lawrence: Complete Poems, p. 17.
20. Christopher Hassall, “D.H. Lawrence and the Etruscans,” Gift Edmonds
Memorial Lecture, Essays by Divers Hands, Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, Vol XXXI, p. 77.
21. T. Moore and Warren Roberts, D.H. Lawrence, Thames and Hudson,
London, 1988, p. 123.
22. V. de. S. Pinto, Introduction to D.H. Lawrence: Complete Poems, p. 21.
23. Douglas Goldring, “The Later Work of D.H. Lawrence,” Reputations, p.
69.

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References: 1. D.H. Lawrence, qt by V. de. S. Pinto, Introduction to D.H. Lawrence: Complete Poems, Penguin, London, 191928, p 3. D.H. Lawrence, Preface to Collected Poems, Penguin, London, 1928, p. 4. Ezra Pound, Review of D.H. Lawrence’s Love Poems and Others, New Freewoman, London, 1913, p 5. Edward Garnet, “Art and the Moralists: D.H. Lawrence’s Work,” Dial, New York, 1916, p 6. D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, Penguin, London, 1970, p. 42. 7. John Gould Fletcher, Review of Look! We Have Come Through!” Poetry, Chicago, 1918, xii, p York, 1981, p. 895. 10. Conrad Aiken, Dial, New York, 1919, lxvii, p. 97. Chapman and Hall, London, 1920, p. 68. 14. Edward Nehls, D.H. Lawrence, A Composite Biography, Wisconsin, 1957-9, pp 15. Edwin Muir, “D.H. Lawrence,” Nation, New York, 1925, cxx, p. 148. 17. Mark Van Doren, “D.H. Lawrence’s Pansies,” New York Herald Tribune Books, New York, 1929, p 21. T. Moore and Warren Roberts, D.H. Lawrence, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, p