Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Lawrence, D. H. - Evelyn Shakir (essay date 1975)

Evelyn Shakir (essay date 1975)

SOURCE: "'Secret Sin': Lawrence's Early Verse," in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1975, pp. 155-75.

[In the following essay, Shakir examines Lawrence's early poems for evidence of his sexual preoccupations. ]

Throughout his career as a writer, Lawrence's attitude toward literature was remarkably ambivalent. "Artspeech is the only truth," he declared (SCAL 2).¹ Yet his mistrust of art was profound. He knew how easily it could degenerate into pretty artifice or aesthetic exercise and so seduce the artist into a lie. But when literature spoke truth, it was perhaps most dangerous and the artist finally most guilty. An examination of Lawrence's early verse, together with his later comments on it, helps explain his misgivings.

In 1928, Lawrence wrote an essay (originally intended as a foreword to his Collected Poems in which he recalled his early efforts at...

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