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  • Lawrence in Red and Black
  • David Ellis (bio)
The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Christopher Pollnitz. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press. 2013. £130. ISBN 9 7805 2122 2686

Cambridge University Press’s long-awaited edition of Lawrence’s poems comes in two thick volumes (with a third to follow). The first provides a critically edited text of the two volumes of poetry which Lawrence published as Collected Poems in 1928, but also includes several other items. The second begins with a long essay in which Christopher Pollnitz establishes as far as is humanly possible, and for the first time, a reliable chronology of composition for all the poems included in the volumes of poetry which were published during Lawrence’s lifetime, and for the one which appeared in 1932, shortly after his death. He also meticulously traces publishing histories for them all, a task which is made particularly complicated by disputes with and between publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, censorship, and the fact that Lawrence spent so much of his adult life in transit, or settled abroad. After threading his way through the resulting intricacies, Pollnitz also offers for each volume a neat summary of its critical reception. The remainder of Volume II of this Cambridge edition is then taken up with textual notes and apparatus, as well as some explanatory annotation, on all the poems in Volume I.

Lawrence divided his 1928 Collected Poems into two major sections of ‘Rhyming’ and ‘Unrhyming’ poems. The former was made up of poems which had appeared in four previous collections, namely Love Poems and Others (1913), Amores (1916), New Poems (1918), and Bay (1920); but in bringing them together he revised them very considerably. One kind of study which these two Cambridge volumes do not at present allow, and which will only become possible when the third appears, is of Lawrence’s early development. His explanation for his revisions is well known and can be consulted again in the foreword he wrote for the 1928 edition since it appears here in one of the appendices at the end of Volume I, where all eight introductory notes or forewords he wrote for his poetry volumes are usefully gathered together. The demon that made him write poetry, he says there, had sometimes the hand of commonplace youth placed over its mouth so [End Page 377] that ‘it is not for technique these poems are altered; it is to say the real say’. What makes this claim dubious is that many of the alterations he made in 1928 were in fact of a minor stylistic variety; but it remains questionable even when they were substantial. A good example is ‘Virgin Youth’. When this appeared in Amores, it was a very effective evocation in twenty-two lines of a young man’s confusion as ungovernable sexual feelings sweep through his body. ‘And my soft slumbering belly | Quivering awake with one impulse of desire’ is its most explicit reference. Lawrence rewrote rather than revised this poem, trebling its length and making parts of it sound like Mellors’s address to his penis in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘He stands and I tremble before him … How beautiful he is’, etc. In this form it could not possibly have been published in 1916 but, more importantly, it was not a poem which, in his early days, Lawrence could possibly have written. To suggest that he could have – if it were not for the inhibiting effects of ‘commonplace youth’ – is to impose a false, teleological pattern on human growth.

Between the rhyming and unrhyming sections of the 1928 volumes of Collected Poems, the reader of the Cambridge edition finds twenty-seven short pieces which Lawrence had gathered together under the title ‘All of us’. Pollnitz’s rationale for this interpolation is that, although in the last years of the war Lawrence had prepared these poems for publication, and clearly wanted and intended them to appear, he could not find anyone to take them on. The most interesting aspect of them now is their genesis. As far back as 1910, Lawrence had acquired a book of German translations of a number of Fellaheen songs...

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