At the time of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in an article for a provincial newspaper I suggested that in time to come (i.e. now!) the real fame of D. H. Lawrence would derive not from his novels but from his poetry. Time has proved me wrong, for there are today probably a hundred readers of The Rainbow or Women in Love to every one familiar with "The Ship of Death."

No doubt this is in part due to the Chatterley affair and its aftermath, but I do hold the view that if the fame of this brilliant writer (for brilliant he is for all his flaws) does not depend upon his poetry, nevertheless in some degree it ought so to do, for he was undeniably a considerable poet of great originality and power.

After all, is there a poet like David Herbert Lawrence? Does not his verse stand quite apart from the mainstream of English poetry and owe, as Blake's does, hardly anything to his forerunners? Is it not true that as he had no precursors so he has had to date no successor? The test of his claim to originality is surely that he cannot be successfully imitated.

In his early years as a poet he was associated with the Imagists, though only loosely so, but a comparison of a truly imagist poem like Ezra Pound's famous example with any poem of Lawrence's will prove that he does not belong with that school.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

("In a Station of the Metro")

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

("Piano")

In retrospect it seems absurd that the often prolix and sometimes rhapsodic Lawrence could ever be classified with such economic word spinners as T. E. Hulme or H.D. Was he then a Georgian poet? True, some of his early pieces were published alongside poems by such typical Georgian figures as Squire or Abercrombie, but other than being their contemporary there is scarcely any point of resemblance. He had no fellows in his one-man school.

Individual as his work was, it was certainly not ignored by those of other persuasions. Even so conservative a figure as J. C. Squire was quick to recognise the merits of Lawrence's verse, though their practice could hardly be more different, nor their philosophies more at variance.

If only one in a hundred readers of Lawrence know his poetry it is still a considerable number. The Collected Poems in two volumes as well as the handy Penguin selection are steady sellers. This poetry obviously still speaks, and speaks powerfully, to a large number of readers, a number far greater than that enjoyed by some of the best poets writing today. Why is this so? What are the strengths of his verse?

To begin with, he was a master craftsman. I have no doubt that had he decided to write in terza rima or to compose a sonnet sequence he could have done so with great efficiency. He chose in the main to use free verse forms, but he understood well that free verse should not be so free as to fall apart. Poetry differs from prose in its cadence and this he knew. It depends upon a certain heightening of language and this he exhibits to perfection without falling into rhetoric for rhetoric's sake. He was undoubtedly familiar with Whitman and his English disciple, Edward Carpenter, but his vers libre is not theirs. At its best it is beautiful, exact, balanced and memorable:

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.

Dead.
He trapped her this morning he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen fine eyes in the brilliant frost of her face . . .

("Mountain Lion")

Or, to take another example:

A woman has given me strength and affluence.
Admitted!
All the rocking wheat of Canada, ripening now,
has not so much of strength as the body of one woman
sweet in ear, nor so much to give
though it feed nations . . .

("Manifesto")

So much for form; what of content? Much of Lawrence's poetry fairly obviously relates to events, external and subjective alike, in his life—his relationship with his mother, with 'Miriam', with his wife, Frieda. Much else is inspired by his travels in both the Old World and the New. These influences and sources are brought together with an intensity of emotion rare in English poetry. Later, his preoccupations widened out to embrace what we have come to think of as the Lawrentian philosophy—a belief that man has been corrupted unto death by civilisation and that the way back to a prelapsarian wholeness lies through sexual love between men and women seen as peers. Lawrence, in fact, is an intensely physical poet and presents us with a heightened awareness of animals, plants, trees; geographies come alive, zoology assumes a quasimetaphysic. These things make his poetry intensely visual, sensual, tactual almost. They can also be his weakness.

But let us not cavil. What of its kind, if indeed it has a kind, is superior to "Snake"?

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness softbellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack, long body . . .

How beautifully, accurately descriptive this is!

The same descriptive or evocative power (also, of course, abundantly present in the novels) is seen in a different and earlier context in the poem "Love on the Farm."

The rabbit presses back her ears,
Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes
And crouches low; then with wild spring
Spurts from the terror of his oncoming;
To be choked back, the wire ring
Her frantic effort throttling;
Piteous brown ball of quivering fears!
Ah, soon in his large, hard hands she dies,
And swings all loose from the swing of his walk!

Such passages as these give us Lawrence at his most powerful. In many of the small, late, embittered bagatelles of his last years we see a smaller spirit, a spiteful mind. The one real flaw in Lawrence as a poet is his occasional lapse into banality, spite or plain silliness. "The Oxford Voice", for example, is a dreadful piece of spiteful inverted snobbery (and I write as a non-Oxonian!) and "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is" is a ridiculous piece of class prejudice.

It is interesting that in his recent anthology The Penguin Book of English Christian Verse Peter Levi includes Lawrence. Lawrence was, of course, no orthodoxly religious man, but his imagery is full of Judeo-Christian allusions. That he was a religious man is not in serious doubt, but no orthodoxy could have held his mind. The poem "Phoenix" may be seen as a restatement of the Christian doctrine that to gain your life you must be prepared to lose it, but this does not make him a Christian in any ordinary sense of the term.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing? dipped into oblivion?

If not you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash . . .

And if that poignant and beautiful poem "The Ship of Death" is not a religious poem then there is no such thing. In "The Body of God" Lawrence comes as near as he ever does to stating his credo—

There is no god
apart from poppies and flying fish,
men singing songs, and women brushing their hair in the sun.
The lovely things are god that has come to pass, like Jesus came.
The rest, the undiscoverable, is the demiurge.

To summarise, D. H. Lawrence is undeniably a poet of skill, of emotional power, of prolific if uneven achievement, a brilliant observer and delineator of people, creatures and places, a religious poet with no formal code of belief. Do these add up to greatness? Is he a minor poet, a major poet or a major-minor?

These value judgements seem to me very difficult and of dubious value. Lawrence was not one of the towering geniuses of poetry alongside Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Virgil. But is he less than, say, Browning, Shelley, Heine, Herbert, Hopkins? For my own part I think not, but in the last analysis such mensuration of genius is of no great value. A true poet is a unique and uniquely valuable human being and that, surely, is enough.

Let Lawrence's own words speak for him—

I have been, and I have returned.
I have mounted up on the wings of the morning and I have dredged down to the zenith's reversal.
Which is my way, being man.
Gods may stay in mid-heaven, the Son of Man has climbed to the Whitsun zenith,
But I, Matthew, being a man
Am a traveller back and forth.
So be it.

("St. Matthew")