Lawrence, D. H. - Ezra Pound (essay date 1913)

Ezra Pound (essay date 1913)

SOURCE: A review of Love Poems and Others, in Poetry, Vol. 2, No. 4, July, 1913, pp. 149-51.

[In the following review of Love Poems and Others, Pound concludes that Lawrence poetry succeeds in realistically detailing everyday lives whereas the poetry of John Masefield does not. ]

The Love Poems, if by that Mr. Lawrence means the middling-sensual erotic verses in[Love Poems and Others,] 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...

[The entire page is 644 words long]

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