Lawrence's Poetry

Book Reviews evidence in the choice of variant readings, as Kalnins states the approach, is too conjectural to be trusted. Now surely, in the case of Aaron's Rod, this approach is a mistake . In Chapter XTV of the novel—as only one example among many—Lawrence's hand is evident beyond any reasonable doubt in numerous readings of the Seeker edition. As we know from the Seltzer typescript, Lawrence cut and rewrote a great deal in this chapter. (The rejected passages are printed in an appendix.) By my count the textual apparatus of the Cambridge edition lists forty-five substantive variants between the American and English editions. I am willing to venture that thirty of them are of Lawrence's own composition. First of all, no one but the author would have had any reason to make such changes, and they also bear the mark of Lawrence 's style. For instance, at 183:14 "set purpose," the copy-text reading, becomes "fixed purpose and sharp will" in the Seeker edition. What could be more Laurentian than this? Or take the Seeker reading at 185:26, where the addition of vivid descriptive details to a scene in Florence could have been made by no one but Lawrence, as he was the only one present. For reasons too lengthy to take up here, I question even whether the long passage on pages 239-241 of the Cambridge text was deleted by Seeker for fear of raising public eyebrows . Lawrence's fluid conception of the character based on Norman Douglas may well have caused him to strike out these pages himself. Of course, by the proceeding that I suggest as preferable, no editor could hope to distinguish each and every Lawrence revision in the Seeker text, but in an overwhelming majority of cases I believe that one could. What the argument comes down to is that with less adherence to positive identification and more willingness to exercise an informed judgment from circumstantial evidence, an edition closer to what I see as Lawrence's final intentions would have emerged. L. D. Clark University of Arizona Lawrence's Poetry Holly A. Laird. Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. xii + 290 pp. $35.00 IN SELF AND SEQUENCE: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Holly A. Laird begins by conceding that Lawrence's poetry is "barely acknowledged by the scholarship of modernism." The reason, she suggests, is 249 ELT: Volume 33:2, 1990 that the poetry "presents a problem of . . . taxonomy." The poems seem weak as individual lyrics—which is what they seem to be. But that, according to Laird, is exactly where the problem lies: "In a letter of 1913 Lawrence devalued the lyric' in favor of the 'dramatic' author, classifying them respectively as the 'egoist' and the 'fertile' writer." An author of the latter category, Lawrence wrote poems that are best understood as a "series of stories Lawrence told about himself in successive books." Each story is said to have an underlying logic or argument (one that is often articulated in a contemporary prose work). Laird, whose project is to detect and develop these stories, says that her method is "autobiographical." It turns out to be textual, too, since the discovery of Lawrence's sequences, stories, and their underlying arguments often requires that the critic look at early editions and their manuscript sources. The first period of Lawrence's poetic life—the one defining the first set of story sequences—stretched from 1906-1914, according to Laird. Looking at companion poems written during this period she shows how a story of "biographical changes" may be inferred or induced from "the space between . . . two poems." Perhaps more informatively , she relates that Lawrence wrote longer manuscript sequences (such as "A Life History in Harmonies and Discords"), later publishing only a few of the member poems ("Discord in Childhood" and "Twenty Years Ago"). Thus, she suggests, we have judged some of the early poems without their story contexts. Worse, we have failed to see underlying arguments that only whole sequences advance. From the early sequences Laird proceeds to discuss the poems that eventually became part of Love...