Lawrence, D. H. - Michael Kirkham (essay date 1972)

Michael Kirkham (essay date 1972)

SOURCE: "D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems," in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer, 1972, pp. 97-120.

[In the following essay, Kirkham examines Lawrence's Last Poems as a poetic sequence with consistent themes and execution.]

This essay falls into three parts. In the first part I suggest that Last Poems is best read as a single work, forming a loosely connected sequence of thought. I see Lawrence performing an act of spiritual preparation, the directing purpose of which is to construct a state of mind that will steady him in the face of death. In the second part I discuss the central themes of the sequence. I try to show that, though much of the thought expressed here is inherited from his previous work, a number of poems, in meeting the challenge of the fact of death to a doctrine centered on physical existence, reveal a startling change of attitude. In my final section, through a...

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