7 - Lawrence’s poetry

Summary

Although he is remembered and celebrated today primarily as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence first saw publication as a poet, wrote poetry throughout most of his life, and granted a privileged status to poetic language and vision: 'The essential quality of poetry', he declared in a 1928 essay, 'is that it makes a new effort of attention, and “discovers” a new world within the known world.' That he was far too prolific and undiscriminating a poet, few readers would dispute: the posthumously published Complete Poems, at more than 1,000 pages long, functions better as a doorstop than as light bedtime reading. That a great many of his poems are didactic, prosy, irrational, undisciplined, sentimental, obscene, ranting, whiny or otherwise virtually unreadable, critics have agreed at least since 1919, when the rawly emotional marriage poems of Look! We Have Come Through! prompted Lawrence's sometime friend Bertrand Russell to snort, 'They may have come through, but I don't see why I should look.' Lawrence's less fortunate poetic efforts do occasionally have value, if not as aesthetic masterpieces, then at least as historical documents of artistic struggle. His most memorable poems, however, stand alongside the finest poetic efforts of the twentieth century and are still widely anthologised and admired by readers today.