“Thought,” he says in More Pansies, “is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.” Have his readers wholly attended to him? “But, my dear God, when I see all the understanding and suffering and the pure intelligence necessary for the simple perceiving of poetry, then I know it is an almost hopeless business to publish the stuff at all,” he wrote to Harriet Monroe. It seems scarcely possible that the old charges of hysteria, anti-craftmanship, can still be leveled, that his own references to “the demon” (in the Preface to the Collected Poems, 1928) can still be misread. (“From the first, I was a little afraid of my real poems—not my ‘compositions’ but the poems that had the ghost in them. … Now I know my demon better, and after bitter years, respect him more than my other, milder and nicer self.”) Organic form, about which we still understand so little, for which the textbooks have yet to be written, we perhaps now know better than to equate with formlessness. That Lawrence was capable of writing formless poems (some of them in traditional patterns, e.g. the early, curiously perfunctory “Sigh No More”) cannot be denied, any more than it can be denied of Whitman or Emily Dickinson. What is clearly visible in the early poetry is the process, the struggle, of choice, the wresting out of other identities into his own, the growing knowledge that Hardy, Whitman, though natural affinities, can provide no final solutions: he must create his own forms.

Reading the essay on “Poetry of the Present” (here published as a preface to the “Unrhymed Poems”): could anything be clearer, more conscious of its purpose? It works organically, like a poem: very rarely a piece of criticism can do this, demonstrate in its own movement and texture the possibilities of which it speaks. Lawrence draws his distinction between poetry which is “the voice of the far future or of the past, and the poetry of the quick, pulsing, immediate. The former must have that exquisite finality, perfection which belongs to all that is far off. … This completeness, this consummateness … are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end.” The “rare new poetry” of the flux and flight of the immediate present “cannot have the same body or the same motion as the poetry of the before and after. … There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened.” There follows an enlightening passage on the metrics of free verse. Lawrence never argues that the poetry of the present moment is or should be the unique, the only true poetry; he is never programmatic. This essay in fact prepares the awareness for poems to come, breaking down certain mental blockades or ways of taking a poem. But when you finish reading the essay, this has been done to you not by reasoned manifesto but by a process of almost physical exposure to the quality of the thing itself. The intelligence working in it is far from being purely ecstatic; but it is the intelligence of the artist, not of the literary analyst. It is an essay of large importance for the poet, for the literary historian, for the reader of Lawrence, for the reader of existing poetry of all kinds.

Let it be said clearly: Lawrence is a major poet, and the present collection fully reveals the quantity as well as the quality of his best poems. And the organic shape and movement of these poems has nothing mindless and happenstance about it: he knows what he is doing with line-length, with diction, with pause, repetition, termination.

Love, hate, the self. How repeatedly, in Lawrence, the longing for escape appears, escape of the kind Eliot meant when he said, “But of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it is to want to escape from those things.” Remarkable men, who see the nature of experience in almost mutually exclusive ways, have also their moments of consanguinity. Lawrence is forever searching for an inward zone of apartness. To be as private as an animal!

You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence
as it lifts its straight white throat.
Your hand would not be so flig and easy.
Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder,
curled up in the sunshine like a princess;
when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder
you did not stretch forward to caress her …

(“She Said as Well to Me”)

To exist in one's uniqueness, and still in profound relation to another—

I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness
and perish on me as I have perished on her.
When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest sources, the darkest outgoings, when it has struck home to her, like a death, “this is him!” she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible other,
then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her,
I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver,
one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she also, pure, isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction.

(“Manifesto”)

Love, the word itself, being today an emotional pantry even more than when Lawrence wrote, it's easy to read hate as the final destination of Lawrence's journey beyond love; to diagnose his “problem” even more crudely as fear of women, as embryonic Fascism, as egomania. But Lawrence knew the shallowness of pure ego-satisfaction for what it was: see for example the ironic little portraits in “True Love at Last” or “Ultimate Reality” or “Intimates” (all in More Pansies). And he knew the frenetic sterility of the soul that, like the little black dog in New Mexico, is “Such a waggle of love you can hardly distinguish one human from another.” The naked irritability, and revulsion, that Lawrence felt in the face of many human contacts was the price he paid, and that we pay in suffering much of it through his poems, for his enormous sense of the possibilities inherent in human contacts and human separateness. At times it is paid brilliantly, in poems like “Frost Flowers”; elsewhere it simply devours the poem. Yet everywhere is evidence that he found man sacred in design even if degraded in execution. And nature, which he never sentimentalized, was always sacred to him. He was able to fuse them—the natural world and the possible nature of man—in poems which purify as they redefine love and sex in both their spasmodic and timeless modes:

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths;
love is like the grass, but the soul is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, woman, and lose sight of yourself,
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart
is there a gem, which came into being between us?
is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark?
Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint?

(“Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply”)

And one style Lawrence never had, as poet or in life. His pride, his intolerance, stand invincibly opposed to the posture of the loving fool, the ironic self-depreciation of God's poor slob. There is something cleanly arrogant in Lawrence's bitterness, the astringency of a drop of pure alcohol. His vituperation is nearly always aimed at some form of self-indulgence, of narcissism, of emotional neurasthenia. He would have been ill at home in a society where people not only eat the ones they love but do so out of simplistic moral motives.

Pansies; More Pansies. The ones that get most often quoted and anthologized are the anti-bourgeois squibs, the outbursts against mass society, the machine, censorship. Lawrence himself fosters, in his prefaces, the notion that we have to do here with “a little bunch of fragments”; “casual thoughts”. And in fact, while some of these crackle and sting with nervous wit, others are deliberate doggerel, Lawrence rhyming and fuming aloud. But a large number are poems, part of Lawrence's central achievement: e.g., the short series on Touch, the poem “Know Deeply” quoted in part above, and the one just preceding it, “Fidelity”. And some of the religious poetry:

Who is it that softly touches the sides of my breast and touches me over the heart so that my heart beats soothed, soothed, soothed and at peace?
Who is it smooths the bed-sheets like the cool smooth ocean where the fishes rest on edge in their own dream?
Who is it that clasps and kneads my naked feet, till they unfold, till all is well, till all is utterly well? the lotus-lilies of the feet!
I tell you, it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone.

(“There Are No Gods”)

How many little anthologies could be put together out of the two Pansies volumes alone! anthologies compiled to prove almost anything for or against Lawrence. And of course, they would all be misleading. Because the total impression in the Collected Poems is the refusal to belong, to become anyone's pet D. H. L. or straw man. After all the memoirs, the letters, the photographs on sunny terraces, the romans à cléf by other hands, the toilsome efforts to come to terms with him posthumously by those who knew him, the fact remains that we have long had an imperfect notion of Lawrence and a poorly balanced vision of his ideas. The use of the phrase “Lawrentian” to indicate a kind of primitivism; the odd assumption that Lawrence was attracted by political power or could have stomached any process of mob-manipulation; the belief that sexual union was for him a cure-all or an exclusive source of truth—these and other equally blurred gropings for a formula are gainsaid in the experience of the poetry in full.

Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages.
Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of its coarse stem?
Oh what in you can answer to this blueness?

Look! We Have Come Through! This sequence has more diversity of tone, intention, accent than any unified sequence of love poems since Shakespeare. In a literal sense the man and woman of Look! … are a microcosm, a world in which nearly everything happens. It is Lawrence's functional honesty that produces this variety, his rejection of the blandishments of false consistency, of turning a good face to the world. Compare “She Looks Back”, a poem bitter at the division in the woman's soul, her longing for her children, with “Meeting among the Mountains”, in which the face of a bullock-cart driver encountered “among the averted flowers” near a wayside crucifix seems to recall the woman's suffering husband. Neither poem is a vindication, nowhere in this series do we smell the odor of self-pity, or the lust to charm or wheedle. And, blisteringly close as these poems are to actual events, conversations, sufferings, you can feel the quality of the mind that could render its and another's anguish so precisely even while it was gradually inventing the texture and dimensions of the later great poetry concerned with love: “She Said as Well to Me”, “Manifesto”, “Know Deeply”, “Deeper Than Love”, etc. If the poems are rooted in personal history they are also rooted in the development of a mind, for this hero of the instinctual was one of the most intelligent men of any time, who knew that “The profoundest of all sensualities / is the sense of truth”; and that “All vital truth contains the memory of that for which it is not true.”

Language. More than any other poet-novelist's, Lawrence's fiction and his poems breathe in the same language. It appears at first startlingly simple, direct, almost naïf at moments, with its abrupt entrances and exits, its declarative sentences, its repetitions, with infinitesimal variations, of a word or a phrase. The directness and repetition are related to the English of the King James Version, more than to Imagist or Georgian poetry, as the editor of this edition rightly notes. But Lawrence's use of repetition is more than incantation. It has to do with his passionate grasp upon the physical world, as total as any in our language. With delicate, deliberate touch he palpates the physical shell or skin of reality until it seems to relax and fall open:

Fig-trees, weird fig-trees
Made of thick smooth silver,
Made of sweet, untarnished silver in the sea-southern air—
I say untarnished, but I mean opaque—
Thick, smooth-fleshed silver, dull only as human limbs are dull
With the life-lustre,
Nude with the dim light of full, healthy life
That is always half-dark,
And suave like passion-flower petals,
Like passion-flowers,
With the half-secret gleam of a passion-flower hanging from the rock,
Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh,
Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life.

He was able to redeem the old words of richness, plenitude, light, and darkness in their primalness, through his insistence on keeping close to the power of the object, seeing it from every side (those suave, lustrous fig-trees become concretely absurd and admirable as the poem moves on, ending as the “equality-puzzle”, the ego-mystery ironically perceived). To do this for language it is not enough to be “intoxicated with words”; one has to be intoxicated with things in their natures, their detail, their physical essences. And Lawrence was. If in “Bavarian Gentians” the words “dark”, “blue”, and “darkness” become key-notes to an hypnotic chant of passage, it is first of all because the living flower in its precise, physical truth hypnotizes Lawrence:

ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day, torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze …

And as with language, so with the world: it was in a very real sense sacramentally that Lawrence saw what he saw. The poems that fail seem to be the ones where he failed to attach his vision to anything which could be thus seen; where all that is observable is his disgust and disappointment at loss of possibility, loss of potency. The language becomes thin, vituperative, loose as a torn sail flapping in a squall; the language of a man whose nerves are worn out.

O cease to listen to the living dead.
They are only greedy for your life!
O cease to labour for the gold-toothed dead.
They are so greedy, yet so helpless if not worked for.
Don't ever be kind to the dead
it is pandering to corpses,
the repulsive, living fat dead.

In studying the complete work of a major poet, there is always a group of poems to which we revert over and over, not only for their individual force and beauty, but because through them we come to trust the entire oeuvre, to give a hearing to other poems less immediately attractive or accessible to us. It is as if we watched a man in certain situations and said: “There, the man who could do this, or that, is one to whom I can give credence in whatever he does; such a man has value for me even where I do not understand him or feel sympathy for his ideas”. For me, a list of such poems by Lawrence would include, of the earlier poems, “End of Another Home Holiday”, “The Collier's Wife”, “Bei Hennef”, “In the Dark”, “Mutilation”, “Sinners”, “She Said as Well to Me”, “Frost Flowers”; most of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but especially “Bare Almond-Trees”, “Bare Fig-Trees”, “Sicilian Cyclamens”, “The Mosquito”, “Man and Bat”, “Peach”, “Snake”, “Baby Tortoise”. It would also include “The Man of Tyre”, “There Are No Gods”, “Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply”, “Swan, Elemental”, and the two late poems, “Bavarian Gentians” and “The Ship of Death”. The last two poems alone, it seems to me, must persuade anyone that this poet's entire work bears listening to, that the full dimensions are worth having. The present edition should have influence and significance far beyond a specialized audience.