Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Lawrence, D. H. - Arthur Waugh (essay date 1919)

Arthur Waugh (essay date 1919)

SOURCE: "Mr. D. H. Lawrence," in Tradition and Change: Studies in Contemporary Literature, Books for Libraries Press, 1919, pp. 131-7.

[In the following essay, Waugh assesses Lawrence's poetry as lacking in unifying ideas and the poetic skills necessary to espouse them.]

The modern conception of poetry is so astonishingly different from the conception, for example, of the last generation before our own, that it is worth while to take stock of the situation now and again, and to try to get some clear notion of the direction in which we are drifting. Changes there must be, of course; and the critic who withstands change for its own sake is self-condemned already. But in the realm of the arts there are certain fixed principles which have survived all the vagaries of fashion; and work which has defied those principles has never lasted. Novelty and audacity attract their momentary public; but novelty is soon...

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