Lawrence, D. H. - Kenneth Rexroth (essay date 1947)

Kenneth Rexroth (essay date 1947)

SOURCE: An introduction to D. H. Lawrence: Selected Poems, New Directions, 1947, pp. 1-23.

[In the following introduction to Lawrence's Selected Poems, Rexroth believes that, rather than being a major poet like Thomas Hardy, Lawrence was a minor prophet like William Blake and William Butler Yeats.]

At the very beginning Lawrence belonged to a different order of being from the literary writers of his day. In 1912 he said: "I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in turn loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in . . ."

Do you know what he read all...

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