Lawrence first put together the collection of his poems in 1928. They are arranged chronologically "to make up a biography of an emotional and inner life".
In the Preface to this second edition of her first book, Sandra M. Gilbert addresses the inevitable question: "How can you be a feminist and a Lawrentian?" The answer is intellectually satisfying and historically revealing as she traces an array of early twentieth-century women of letters, some of them proto-feminists, who revered Lawrence despite his countless statements that would today be condemned as "sexist." H.D. regarded him as one of her "initiators" whose words "flamed alive, blue serpents on the page." Anais Nin insisted that he "had a complete realization of the feelings of women." By focusing on Lawrence’s own definition of a poem as an "act of attention," Gilbert demonstrates how he developed the mature style of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, his finest collection of poetry. She discusses this volume at length, examines many of his later poems in detail, including the hymns from The Plumed Serpent, Pansies, Nettles, and More Pansies, and ends with a close look at Last Poems. Her detailed examination provides a clearer image of Lawrence as an artist—an artist whose poetry complements his novels and whose fiction enriches but does not outshine his poetry.
This exceptional collection contains a rich cross-section of Lawrence's work, including the title poem, "A Collier's Wife," "Monologue of a Mother," "Fireflies in the Corn," and several others.
"You Touched Me" is a comic/tragic story of a forced marriage brought about by an accidental touch in the night but the depth of the writing leaves the reader unsure if the couple are marrying for money or to release the passions realised by the touch in the night.
This book traces D. H. Lawrence's development as a poet from his earliest to his latest poems. Focusing on the revision of poems in the Collected Poems, 1928, Mandell uncovers the implicit autobiographical narrative that underlies the collection and that dictates its structure. Lawrence rearranged and rewrote the poems to conform to a chronologic, thematic, and mythic plan, a plan he hints at in the unpublished Foreword to Collected Poems. In its final form, the poetry tells the story of Lawrence's "demon," a figure of his essential self, by recounting the chronological development of the "new" from the "old" self. Comparing form and content of versions of representative poems from the collection, Mandell analyzes the evaluation not only of Lawrence's poetic style but also of his ideas concerning human and physical nature. She contends that Lawrence was a mature poet with a developed system of poetic and philosophical thought by 1917, when he published Look! We Have Come Through! At that time he rewrote extensively. Through comparison of selected poems, several of which appear in print for the first time, we can reproduce Lawrence's emendations and thus depict the creative mind at work.
A completely new selection of D. H. Lawrence's poetry Published as part of a series of new editions of D. H. Lawrence's works, this major collection presents the fullest range of the author's poetry available today. Selected by prize-winning poet and scholar James Fenton, these lush, evocative poems offer a direct link to the genius of one of the twentieth century's most provocative writers. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
D.H. Lawrence: Being Alive: Selected Poems Edited with an introduction by Margaret Elvy D.H. Lawrence's strident and idiosyncratic evocations of sex, touch, Spring, flowers, nature, love, black suns, fish and other glories are gathered here in this new selection. British Poets Series. Bibliography and notes. D.H. Lawrence s poetry is far less known than his fiction. It is often loose, rather than fluid, and unstructured rather than free verse, and messy rather than well-defined. It is a poetry, as Lawrence stresses, of the moment, a poetry in the process of becoming, constantly dissolving. In the Foreword to his book Pansies, he wrote of that breathless transience, embodied for him in the life of a flower: the breath of the moment, and one eternal moment easily contradicting the next eternal moment. Only don t nail the pansy down. You won t keep it any better if you do. In the introduction to the American edition of New Poems, Lawrence wrote: Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight, nakedly passing radiance. Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don t give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative quick. There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and the infinite future. The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting of the before and after. Lawrence s typical poetry occurs in poems such as Sicilian Cyclamens, Snake and Snap-Dragon, longish, loose poems with a lot space that allow Lawrence to explore his subject. Lawrence covers a surprisingly wide range of subjects in his poesie - far wider than, say, Robert Graves or Thomas Hardy or John Keats. Among poets, there is no one quite like him. Like every poet, he has his pet notions, and keeps hacking away at them: the river of blood of the Sons and Lovers era, the democracy of touch from Lady Chatterley s Lover, the Christological machismo of The Plumed Serpent lyrics, the hatred of labour, the love of all things Mediterranean, and the primacy of the body.