Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) | Ezra Pound (review date July 1913)
Ezra Pound (review date July 1913)
SOURCE: Pound, Ezra. Review of Love Poems and Others. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 2, no. 4 (July 1913): 149-51.
[In the following review, poet Pound offers a brief review of Lawrence's first book of verse.]
The Love Poems, if by that Mr. Lawrence means the middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection, are a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so. The attempts to produce the typical Laurentine line have brought forth:
I touched her and she shivered like a dead snake.
which was improved by an even readier parodist, to
I touched her and she came off in scales.
Jesting aside, when Mr. Lawrence ceases to discuss his own disagreeable sensations, when he writes low-life narrative, as he does in “Whether or Not” and in “Violets,” there is no English poet under forty who can get within shot of him. That Masefield should be...
[The entire page is 660 words long]
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