Lawrence, D. H. - Conrad Aiken (essay date 1919)

Conrad Aiken (essay date 1919)

SOURCE: "The Melodic Line: D. H. Lawrence," in Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, Alfred A. Knopf, 1919, pp. 91-104.

[In the following essay on Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! Aiken argues that the poem reads more like a novel, and that Lawrence's grasp of poetic techniques are limited.]

It has been said that all the arts are constantly attempting, within their respective spheres, to attain to something of the quality of music, to assume, whether in pigment, or pencil, or marble, or prose, something of its speed and flash, emotional completeness, and well-harmonied resonance; but of no other single art is that so characteristically or persistently true as it is of poetry. Poetry is indeed in this regard two-natured: it strikes us, when it is at its best, quite as sharply through our sense of the musically beautiful as through whatever implications it has to carry of thought or feeling:...

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