D. H. Lawrence
Poems

D. H. Lawrence is one of those poets who gets buried under his own reputation. Mention his name and most people think of banned novels, scandalous affairs, and court cases. The poetry tends to get left in that shadow, which is a genuine loss, because it is where you can hear him most directly — unguarded, repetitive in the way a person actually thinks, reaching for something he cannot quite name. He came from Eastwood, a Nottinghamshire mining town, and the tension between that background and his mother's fierce social ambitions never left him. You feel it in poems that linger on small domestic details — a child's foot, a window, an autumn field — as if the ordinary world holds a charge he keeps trying to discharge onto the page. His mother's death in 1910 broke something open in him, and the poetry that follows is rawer for it. Lawrence had no interest in the polished, tidy Georgian lyric that was fashionable in his day. His poems sprawl. They circle back. They argue with themselves and occasionally with the reader. He preferred the energy of a thought in motion over the neat landing of a finished thought. Walt Whitman was his touchstone, and you can feel that long-breath influence in the way his lines stretch and breathe. But Lawrence is darker than Whitman, more willing to sit inside discomfort without resolving it. His subject matter ranges widely across the work collected here: childhood memories, grief, erotic longing, the natural world observed with an almost unsettling attention. He is especially good on the borderlands between states — the moment before sleep, the edge of winter, the feeling after an argument when the air in a room is still wrong. He writes about emotional life the way a good naturalist writes about weather: closely, without sentimentality, alert to what is actually happening rather than what is supposed to be happening. The best place to start is not his most ambitious work but the poems where this close attention is most concentrated. From there you can move outward into the elegies, the childhood poems, and the stranger, more visionary pieces. Lawrence rewards a reader who is willing to slow down and let the repetitions do their work. He is not showing off. He is trying to get something right, and watching him try is the pleasure.