Lawrence, D. H. - Phyllis Bartlett (essay date 1951)

Phyllis Bartlett (essay date 1951)

SOURCE: "Lawrence's Collected Poems: The Demon Takes Over," in PMLA, Vol. 66, 1951, pp. 583-93.

[In the following essay, Bartlett examines the nature and breadth of Lawrence's revisions of his earlier poems for the 1928 Collected Poems.]

It is well known that D. H. Lawrence was an unsparing rewriter of his fiction, and the tradition persists that "he could never revise, he could only rewrite." Yet, although he rewrote a number of poems, as he did his short stories and novels, he revised many more—nearly all of them, in fact, either before or after publication. His most concentrated period of activity as a poetic reviser was the winter of 1927-28, when he collected his poems for the publisher Martin Secker, and he remarked at this time that he felt "like an autumn morning, a perfect maze of gossamer of rhythms and rhymes and loose lines floating in the air." No wonder he felt this way, for he had...

[The entire page is 5172 words long]

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