Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Lawrence, D. H. - Adrienne Rich (essay date 1965)

Adrienne Rich (essay date 1965)

SOURCE: "Comment: Reflections on Lawrence," in Poetry, Vol. 106, 1965, pp. 218-25.

[In the following review of The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Rich assesses Lawrence as a major poet, finding evidence that Lawrence deliberately reduced many poems to doggerel for effect, and arguing that Lawrence is the English language's best love poet since William Shakespeare.]

"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-craftsmanship, can still be leveled, that his own references to "the demon" (in the Preface to the...

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