Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) | Adrienne Rich (review date June 1965)

Adrienne Rich (review date June 1965)

SOURCE: Rich, Adrienne. “Reflections on Lawrence.” Poetry 106, no. 3 (June 1965): 218-25.

[In the following review of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, Rich suggests that this collection is essential to understanding the depth and breadth of Lawrence's significance as a major poet.]

“Thought,” he says in More Pansies, “is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.” Have his readers wholly attended to him? “But, my dear God, when I see all the understanding and suffering and the pure intelligence necessary for the simple perceiving of poetry, then I know it is an almost hopeless business to publish the stuff at all,” he wrote to Harriet Monroe. It seems scarcely possible that the old charges of hysteria, anti-craftmanship, can still be leveled, that his own references to “the demon” (in the Preface to the Collected Poems, 1928) can still be misread. (“From...

[The entire page is 2911 words long]

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