D. H. Lawrence as Poet

In his lifetime D. H. Lawrence published eleven collections of his poems, including the Collected Poems (1928). Nettles (1930) and Last Poems (1932) were published posthumously. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts published both collected and uncollected poems in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence in 1964, to be reissued with minor revisions in 1967 and 1972. Over the years several editions of Lawrence’s selected as well as complete poems have appeared; the latest inexpensive paperback, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (2002), edited by David Ellis, is the most reliable. This much-awaited The Poems is the last in the series Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, the first edition of which, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume i (1901–1913), was published in 1979. This book is radically different from the other editions in the series in that it is in two volumes: the first consists of Lawrence’s poems, and the second larger one offers elaborate textual apparatus containing details about manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, transmission of the texts, etc.

The editor of this volume, Christopher Pollnitz, has located and examined a large number of related documents in his attempt to determine the exact contents of the poems that Lawrence wrote and apparently wished to publish. Pollnitz also tries to trace the various stages that Lawrence went through in the writing and publication of his poems. In the process he becomes a kind of “textual biographer” and quite frequently indulges in guesswork in his attempt to reconstruct the history of Lawrence’s writing, typing, and transmission of texts. The whole second volume is mainly of interest to students of Lawrence’s poetic craftsmanship; for the general reader the details are not quite comprehensible, nor indeed of much interest. There is nothing in either volume to change the general picture of Lawrence’s development or achievement as a poet.

Lawrence wrote poems throughout his life. He was not influenced by the revolutionary English poets of his time, but it is on record that T. S. Eliot had a high opinion of Lawrence’s writings. As the editor of the Criterion, he told Lawrence on 25 November 1924 that he would like “something of yours in almost every number.” Similarly Ezra Pound advised Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine that she should publish Lawrence’s poems without even looking at them. When Lawrence died in March 1930, Eliot asked Aldous Huxley in April to write a book on his poetry. This is quite remarkable because, unlike the professedly impersonal modern poets, Lawrence was a personal poet who believed that his poems should be judged against the background of his life and experience. In the note to his Collected Poems, he said, “It seems to me that no poetry, not even the best, should be judged as if it existed in the absolute, in the vacuum of the absolute. Even 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.” Each of his poetry collections is clearly related to the different phases of his life. His early poems are about his love for his sweetheart, his experiences as a schoolteacher, his grief over his mother’s death, and, above all, the natural world in which he grew. It is likely that he was influenced by the nature poetry of the Georgians of his time. But instead of their caressing tenderness, Lawrence’s vision is shot through with his awareness of cruelty and terror in nature.

The volume Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) marks the beginning of his more mature poems. As a twenty-seven-year-old man he had eloped with an older married woman, Frieda, to Germany in 1912, and started a new life. The poems are mainly love poems that record the psychological experiences of deep love, as well as the conflicts, uncertainties, and doubts that grew out...