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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781853264177
ISBN: 1853264172
Label: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Manufacturer: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1994-09-05
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Studio: Wordsworth Editions Ltd

Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930. It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: One long poetic journal
Review: Lawrence's poems have never been among my favorites. I think one reason is that they have been so flowing and evanescent, have not come to some critical point in great memorable lines. They are spontaneous outpourings and make a record of his inner life and struggle. And in this inner life he feels into nature and makes the things of this world, animals, trees, plants feel his feelings and respond as him to him. The strange sympathy which overflows in Lawrence makes him unique as a poet.
Joyce Carol Oates in a long instructive critical essay on Lawrence explains part of his poetic practice this way.
"Lawrence's poems are blunt, exasperating, imposing upon us his strangely hectic, strangely delicate music, in fragments, in tantalizing broken-off parts of a whole too vast to be envisioned--and then withdrawing again. They are meant to be spontaneous works, spontaneously experienced; they are not meant to give us the sense of grandeur or permanence that other poems attempt, the fallacious sense of immortality that is an extension of the poet's ego. Yet they achieve a kind of immortality precisely in this: that they transcend the temporal, the intellectual. They are ways of experiencing the ineffable "still point" that Eliot could approach only through abstract language.

"It is illuminating to read Lawrence's entire poetic work as a kind of journal, in which not only the finished poems themselves but variants and early drafts and uncollected poems constitute a strange unity--an autobiographical novel, perhaps--that begins with "The quick sparks . . ." and ends with "immortal bird." This massive work is more powerful, more emotionally combative, than even the greatest of his novels. Between first and last line there is literally everything: beauty, waste, "flocculent ash," the ego in a state of rapture and in a state of nausea, a diverse streaming of chaos and cunning."

Lawrence so restless so individual could not bear the constrictions of traditional poetic form, and he stretches the free verse technique of Whitman even further, bending its broken lines to the shape of his own soul.

I think Oates has its right, and Lawrence is not properly read by reading a poem here and there, but only by immersing oneself in the total flow of his work.

Again his soul and feeling and world are not mine but it is impossible not to feel the poetry interfused in almost all he writes.

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