Lawrence, D. H. - Merle R. Rubin (essay date 1981)

Merle R. Rubin (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: "'Not I, but the Wind That Blows Through Me': Shelleyan Aspects of Lawrence's Poetry," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 102-22.

[In the following essay, Rubin discusses resemblances between the poetry of Lawrence and Percy Bysshe Shelley.]

Despite Lawrence's strenuous denials of influence, specific influences upon his poetry are clearly discernible. In addition to Whitman, Wordsworth, and Blake,1 other influences were the King James Bible, the Nonconformist hymns of Lawrence's chapel youth, and the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, and Hardy. The early love poems are faintly Pre-Raphaelite in their vivid attention to color and detail and more than faintly Swinburnian in their plangent use of small, simple words ("sweet," "cool," "pain," "ache," "darkness," "moon," "sun"). This strain in turn is traceable to the major tradition of...

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