As a poet, and only to a less degree as a novelist, Lawrence belongs to that great race of English writers whose work totters precisely where it towers, collapses exactly in its strength: work written out of a tortured Protestant sensibility and upon the foundation of an incomplete, uncomposed mind: a mind without defenses against the material with which it builds and therefore at every point of stress horribly succumbing to it. Webster, Swift, Blake, and Coleridge—perhaps Donne, Sterne, and Shelley, and on a lesser plane Marston, Thompson (of the Dreadful Night), and Beddoes—these exemplify, in their different ways, the deracinated, unsupported imagination, the mind for which, since it lacked rational structure sufficient to its burdens, experience was too much. Their magnitude was inviolate, and we must take account of it not only for its own sake but also to escape its fate; it is the magnitude of ruins—and the ruins for the most part of an intended life rather than an achieved art.

Such judgment—such prediction of the terms of appreciation—may seem heavy and the operation of willful prejudice (like that of our dying Humanism), but only if the reader refuses to keep in mind that of which he can say more. Criticism, the effort of appreciation, should be focused upon its particular objects, not limited to them. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton, for example, remain monuments (not ruins) of the imagination precisely in what is here a relevant aspect. Their work, whatever the labors of exegesis, remains approximately complete in itself. The work of Shakespeare, even the Sonnets, is not for us an elongation of the poet's self, but is independent of it because it has a rational structure which controls, orders, and composes in external or objective form the material of which it is made; and for that effect it is dependent only upon the craft and conventions of the art of poetry and upon the limits of language. We criticize adversely such work where it fails of objective form or lacks unarticulated composition, as in the Sonnets or Hamlet. We criticize Lycidas because the purpose of the digressions is not articulated and so there is injury to the composition—the growing together into an independent entity—of the poem. And this is the right meat for criticism; this is the kind of complaint to which poetry is of its own being subject; the original sin of which no major work is entirely free.

This essay proposes to outline an attack upon Lawrence as a poet on the grounds just laid out: that the strength of his peculiar insight lacks the protection and support of a rational imagination, and that it fails to its own disadvantage to employ the formal devices of the art in which it is couched. Thus the attack will be technical. No objections will be offered to the view of life involved—which is no more confused than Dostoevski's, and no less a mirror than Shakespeare's; only admiration for its vigor, regret that it did not, and argument that in the technical circumstances it could not, succeed. For it should be remembered that the structure of the imagination no less than the sequence of rhyme is in an important sense a technical matter.

Perhaps our whole charge may be laid on the pretension, found in the Preface to the Collected Poems, that the radical imperfection of poetry is a fundamental virtue. That is not how Lawrence frames it; he says merely that certain of his early poems failed "because the poem started out to be something it didn't quite achieve, because the young man interfered with his demon"; which seems harmless enough until we read that he regards many of his poems as a fragmentary biography, asks us to remember in reading them the time and circumstance of his life, and expresses the wish that in reading the Sonnets we knew more about Shakespeare's self and circumstance. After consideration, I take the young man in the quotation to be just what Lawrence thought he was not, the poet as craftsman, and the demon was exactly that outburst of personal feeling which needed the discipline of craft to become a poem. As for Shakespeare's Sonnets, if we did know more about Shakespeare's self, we should only know a little more clearly where he failed as a poet; the Sonnets themselves would be not a whit improved. A statement of which—since there is always a necessary baggage of historical and intellectual background—I wish to assert only the comparative or provisional truth.

However wrong Lawrence was about the young man, the demon, and Shakespeare's self, the point here is that his remarks explain why there is so little to say about his important poems as poetry, and they characterize the seed of personal strength, which, nourished exclusively, became his weakness, and ultimately brought about his disintegration and collapse as a poet. Lawrence was the extreme victim of the plague afflicting the poetry of the last hundred and fifty years—the plague of expressive form.

You cannot talk about the art of his poetry because it exists only at the minimum level of self-expression, as in the later, more important poems, or because, as in the earlier accentual rhymed pieces written while he was getting under way, its art is mostly attested by its badness. The ordering of words in component rhythms, the array of rhymes for prediction, contrast, transition and suspense, the delay of ornament, the anticipation of the exactly situated dramatic trope, the development of image and observation to an inevitable end—the devices which make a poem cohere, move, and shine apart—these are mostly not here, or are present badly and at fault. This absence of the advantages of craft is not particularly due to the inability to use them, but to a lack of interest. Lawrence hardly ever, after the first, saw the use of anything that did not immediately devour his interest, whether in life or in art. (Poetry, it may be remarked, is never an immediate art but always of implication.)

And he had besides, to control his interests, a special blinding light of his own, and it was only what this light struck or glared on that captured his interest, and compelled, by a kind of automatism, the writing hand. If a good deal else got in as well, it was not from concession or tactical motives, but by accident and willy-nilly, or because Lawrence was deceived and thought his demon illuminated him when not present at all. This is the presumptive explanation of the long reaches of dead-level writing. When you depend entirely upon the demon of inspiration, the inner voice, the inner light, you deprive yourself of any external criterion to show whether the demon is working or not. Because he is yours and you willfully depend on him, he will seem to be operating with equal intensity at every level of imagination. That is the fallacy of the faith in expressive form—the faith some aspects of which we have been discussing, that if a thing is only intensely enough felt its mere expression in words will give it satisfactory form, the dogma, in short, that once material becomes words it is its own best form. By this stultifying fallacy you cannot ever know whether your work succeeds or fails as integral poetry, can know only and always that what you have said symbolizes and substitutes for your experience to you, whatever it substitutes for in the minds of your readers. That Lawrence was aware of this fallacy, only thinking it a virtue, is I think evident; he would not otherwise have pled with his readers to put themselves in his place, to imagine themselves as suffering his experience, while reading the long section of his poems called "Look! We Have Come Through!"; which is a plea, really, for the reader to do the work the poet failed to do, to complete the poems of which he gave only the expressive outlines.

There is a further vitiating influence of Lawrence's dogma as he seems to hold it, whether you take it as the demon of enthusiastic inspiration or the reliance on expressive form; it tends, on the least let-up of particularized intensity, to the lowest order of the very formalism which it was meant to escape: the formalism of empty verbiage, of rodomontade, masquerading as mystical or philosophical poetry. If you become content, even tormentedly, with self-expression, the process of education no less than that of taste ceases, and anything may come to stand, and interchangeably, for anything else. On the one hand the bare indicative statement of experience seems equivalent to insight into it, and on the other the use of such labels as Good or Evil, however accidentally come by, seems to have the force of the rooted concepts which they may, when achieved by long labor or genuine insight, actually possess. Thus a dog's dying howl may be made to express in itself the whole tragedy of life, which it indeed may or may not do, depending on the reach of the imagination, of represented experience, you bring to bear on it. In Lawrence's later poems, where he is most ambitious, there is more of this empty formalism, unknown to him, than in any poet of similar potential magnitude. Whatever happened in his own mind, what transpires in the poems is the statement without the insight, the label without the seizable implied presence of the imaginative reach. The pity is that had Lawrence matured an external form to anywhere near the degree that he intensified his private apprehension, that form would have persuaded us of the active presence of the insight and the imagination which we can now only take on trust or ipse dixit.

These radical defects in Lawrence's equipment and in his attitude toward his work, may be perhaps exhibited in certain of the early poems when he had not deliberately freed himself from those devices of form which, had he mastered them, might have saved him. He began writing in the ordinary way, using to express or discover his own impulses the contemporary models that most affected him. The freshness of his personal life, the process of personal awakening (since he had something to awaken) provided, by rule, a copious subject matter; and the freshness, to him, of other men's conventions amply supplied him and even, again by rule, sometimes overwhelmed him with forms. Occasionally, still in the natural course of a poet's progress, there was in his work a material as well as a formal influence, but rather less frequently than in most poets. For instance, "Lightning" and "Turned Down" are so strongly under the influence of the Hardy of Time's Laughingstocks and Satires of Circumstances, that there was very little room for Lawrence himself in the poems; Hardy's sensibility as well as Hardy's form crowded him out. By apparent paradox, the value of the poems to Lawrence was personal; as renderings of Hardy they add nothing. Where the influence was less apparent, it was more genuine because more digested, and far more successful, as, for example, in the two quatrains called "Gipsy." Hardy was the only then practicing poet who was in the hard-earned habit of composing so much implication in so brief a space and upon the nub of a special circumstance. It was from Hardy that Lawrence learned his lesson. (The nub of circumstance is of course the gypsy's traditional aversion to entering a house.)

I, the man with the red scarf,
Will give thee what I have, this last week's earnings.
Take them and buy thee a silver ring
And wed me, to ease my yearnings.

For the rest, when thou art wedded
I'll wet my brow for thee
With sweat, I'll enter a house for thy sake,
Thou shalt shut doors on me.

Thus houses and doors become "really" houses and doors. The poem is for that quality worth keeping in the early Lawrence canon; but its importance here is in the technical faults—by which I mean its radical and unnecessary variations from the norm of its model. It represents, I think (subject to correction), about as far as Lawrence ever went in the direction of strict accentual syllabic form; which is not very far. Hardy would have been ashamed of the uneven, lop-sided metrical architecture and would never have been guilty (whatever faults he had of his own) of the disturbing inner rhyme in the second quatrain. Lawrence was either ignorant or not interested in these matters; at any rate he failed to recognize the access of being which results from a perfected strict form. He preferred, in this poem, to depend on the best economical statement of his subject with the least imposition of external form, strict or not. This is an example of the fallacy of expressive form; because, granted that he used a set form at all, it is his substance, what he had to say and was really interested in, that suffers through his failure to complete the form. If the reader compares this poem with say Blake's "To the Muses," which is not a very strict poem in itself, the formal advantage will be plain.

A more important poem, a poem which measurably captured more of Lawrence's sensibility, and as it happens more of ours, will illustrate the point, at least by cumulation, more clearly. Take the first poem preserved in the collected edition, "The Wild Common." We have here, for Lawrence says that it was a good deal rewritten, the advantage of an early and a late poem at once. It is, substantially, in its present form, one of the finest of all Lawrence's poems. It presents the pastoral scene suggested by the title, proceeds to describe a naked man (the narrator) watching his white shadow quivering in a sheep-dip; either actually or imaginatively the man enters the water and the shadow is resolved with the substance and is identified; the poem ends with the affirmation, confirmed by singing larks and a lobbing rabbit, that "all that is good, all that is God takes substance!" The feeling is deep and particularized and the emotion is adequate to the material presented. The point here is that in gaining his ends Lawrence used an extraordinary combination of inconsistent modes and means. I ask only, for the sake of the argument, that the reader look at the poem with the same attention to craft as is customary (and is indeed the common proof of appreciation) in the examination of a drawing or a fugue: that he look and read as if he had a trained mind. Take the matter of rhymes. Whether by weakness of sound, weakness of syntactical position, lack of metrical propulsion or, as the case is, restraint, superfluity with regard to sense, or the use of mere homonym for true rhyme—the rhyme words not only fail as good rhymes but because of the distortions they bring about injure the substance and disfigure the outline of the poem. (In other poems such as "Discord in Childhood" the exigencies of rhyme misunderstood dictate actually inconsistent images and tropes.) That is a formal defect; there are also faults in the combinations of the modes of language. In this same poem, without dramatic change to warrant the variation, there are examples of fake "poetic" language, explicit direct presentation, the vague attribute and the precise attribute, colloquial language, and plain empty verbiage. It is as if in one drawing you found employed to the disadvantage of each the modes of outline and inner marking, chiaroscuro, and total visual effect.

Another poem, "Love on a Farm," has the special power of a dramatic fiction; it employs, dramatically, a violent but credible humanitarianism to force the feeling of death into the emotion of love. But it would have been better expanded and proved in prose. There is nothing in the poem to praise as poetry between the image of the intention and the shock of the result. Lawrence simply did not care in his verse—and, after Sons and Lovers, in many reaches of his more characteristic prose—for anything beyond the immediate blueprint expression of what he had in mind. The consequence is this. Since he willfully rejected as much as he could of the great mass of expressive devices which make up the craft of poetry, the success of his poems depends, not so much on his bare statements, as upon the constant function of communication which cannot be expunged from the language.

Only the articulate can be inarticulately expressed, even under the dogma of expressive form, and Lawrence was, within the limits of his obsessive interests, one of the most powerfully articulate minds of the last generation. Since he used language straightforwardly to the point of sloppiness, without ever willfully violating the communicative residue of his words, so much of his intention is available to the reader as is possible in work that has not been submitted to the completing persuasiveness of a genuine form. That much is a great deal; its capacity is the limit of greatness in the human personality. Being human, Lawrence could not escape in his least breath the burden of human experience, and, using language in which to express himself for himself, could not help often finding the existing, readily apprehensible word-forms the only suitable ones. That is a discipline by implication upon the soul of which the purest Protestant, as Lawrence was, cannot be free: the individual can contribute only infinitesimally even to his own idea of himself. In addressing even his most private thoughts he addresses a stranger and must needs find a common tongue between them. Thus Lawrence at his most personal, where he burrowed with most savage rapacity into himself, stood the best chance of terminating his passion in common experience. The language required, the objects of analogy and the tropes of identification, necessarily tended to the commonplace. This is at least negatively true of Lawrence's later, prophetic poems (as it is true on a level of greater magnitude in the prophetic poems of Blake); the fundamental declarations of insight, what Lawrence was after, in the Tortoise poems, could not help appearing in language commonplace for everything except its intensity. Here again it may be insisted, since such insistence is the object of this essay, that had Lawrence secured the same intensity in the process of his form as came naturally to him in seizing his subject, the poems would have escaped the inherent weakness of the commonplace (the loss of identity in the reader's mind) in the strength of separate being.

Before proceeding, as we have lastly to do, to measure and provisionally characterize the driving power in Lawrence's most important work, let us first examine, with a special object, one of the less important but uniquely successful poems. This is the poem called "Corot." It is written at the second remove from the experience involved. Not so much does it deal with a particular picture by Corot, or even with the general landscape vision of Corot, as it attempts a thinking back, by Lawrence, through Corot, into landscape itself as a major mode of insight. Corot—the accumulation of impressions, attitudes, and formal knowledge with which Corot furnishes the attentive mind—is the medium through which the poem transpires. It is perhaps the only poem of its kind Lawrence wrote; a poem with a deliberately apprehended external scaffolding. We know that most poems about pictures, and most illustrations of literature, stultify themselves by keeping to the terms of the art they re-represent—or else come to mere minor acts of appreciation—come, in short, in either case, pretty much to nothing. Something very different took place here. By finding his material at a second remove—the remove of Corot past the remove of language—Lawrence provided himself, for once, with a principle of objective form; which in the fact of this poem composed his material better than he was ever able to compose in terms of mere direct apprehension however intense. Despite the cloudy words—we have the word "dim" used imprecisely three times in thirty-six lines—despite the large words and phrases such as Life and Time, goal, purpose, and mighty direction—and despite the inconsistent meters, Lawrence nevertheless was able to obtain merely because of the constant presence of an external reference ("Corot"), a unity of effect and independence of being elsewhere absent in his work. That the poem may have been as personal for Lawrence as anything he ever wrote makes no difference; for the reader the terms of conception are objective, and the poem could thus not help standing by itself.

The poem is small, its value merely illustrative, and if it is remembered at all it will be so only in the general context of Lawrence; but I have emphasized the principle of its compositional success because it is on similar principles that most great poetry has been composed; or at least—a more prudent statement—similar principles may be extracted from most of the poetry we greatly value: the principle that the reality of language, which is a formal medium of knowledge, is superior and anterior to the reality of the uses to which it is put, and the operative principle, that the chaos of private experience cannot be known or understood until it is projected and ordered in a form external to the consciousness that entertained it in flux. Of the many ways in which these principles may be embodied, Lawrence's poetry enjoys the advantage of but few, and those few by accident, as in "Corot," or because he could not help it, as in the constant reliance on the communicative function of language mentioned above. But he worked in the poverty of apparent riches and felt no need. There was a quality in his apprehension of the experience that obsessed him that in itself sufficed to carry over the reality of his experience in the words of his report—always for him and sometimes for the reader. This I think, for lack of a better word, may be called the quality of hysteria.

Hysteria comes from the Greek word for womb, and, formerly limited to women, was the name given to extraordinary, disproportionate reactions to the shock of experience. In hysteria the sense of reality is not annulled, resort is not to fancy or unrelated illusion; the sense of reality is rather heightened and distorted to a terrifying and discomposing intensity. The derangement of the patient is merely the expression, through a shocked nervous system, of the afflicting reality. But hysteria is not limited in its expressive modes to convulsions and shrieking. We have hysterias which express themselves in blindness, deafness, paralysis, and even secondary syphilis (lacking of course the appropriate bacteria). Some forms of romantic love may be called habit-hysterias of a comparatively benign character. In all these modes what is expressed has an apparent overwhelming reality. The blind man is really blind, the deaf deaf, and the paralytic cannot move—while hysteria lasts.

Now I do not wish to introduce Lawrence as a clinical example of hysteria; it would be inappropriate and unnecessary to any purpose of literary criticism; but I think it can be provisionally put that the reality in his verse, and in his later prose (from The Rainbow to Mornings in Mexico if not in Lady Chatterley's Lover) is predominantly of the hysterical order. Hysteria is certainly one of the resources of art—as it represents an extreme of consciousness; and it is arguable that much art is hysteria controlled—that is, restored to proportion by seizure in objective form. And the reader should remember that in a life so difficult to keep balanced, plastic, and rational, the leaning toward the expressive freedom of hysteria may often be intractable. The pretense or fact of hysteria is an ordinary mode of emotional expression. The reality of what is expressed is intense and undeniable, and is the surest approach to the absolute. But what is expressed in hysteria can never be wholly understood until the original reality is regained either by analysis or the imposition of limits. Otherwise, and in art, the hysteria is heresy and escapes the object which created it. That is how I think Lawrence worked; he submitted the obsessions of his experience to the heightening fire of hysteria and put down the annealed product just as it came. His special habit of hysteria is only a better name for the demon, the divinity, referred to in the Preface to the Collected Poems; and there is no reason to suppose that Lawrence would himself reject the identification. The reality persists, and is persuasive to those who catch the clue and accept the invitation by its very enormity.

Certainly it is in terms of some such notion that we must explain Lawrence's increasing disregard of the control of rationally conceived form and his incipient indifference, in the very last poems, to the denotative functions of language. So also we may explain the extraordinary but occasional and fragmentary success of his poetry as expression: by the enormity of the reality exposed. As it happens, Lawrence's obsessions ran to sex, death, the isolation of the personality, and the attempt at mystical fusion. Had he run rather to claustrophobia, fetish-worship, or some of the more obscure forms of human cowardice, his method of expression would have been less satisfactory: since it would not have commanded the incipient hysteria of sympathy. The normal subject matter, in the sense of a sturdy preoccupation with ordinary interests, kept his enormity of expression essentially accessible in most of his poems, although there are some places, for example in "The Ship of Death" or "Sicilian Cyclamens," where the hysteric mode carries the pathetic fallacy and the confusion of symbols beyond any resolution.

But normal subject matter was not the only saving qualification; there is in the best poems a kind of furious underlying honesty of observation—the very irreducible surd that makes the hysteria an affair of genius not of insanity. One aspect of this honesty is perhaps most clearly seen in the poem called "She Said as Well to Me," which I think marks the climax of the long series called "Look! We Have Come Through!" There Lawrence manages to present, for all the faults of the work he did not do, and merely by the intensified honesty of the observation, the utter dignity of the singleness and isolation of the individual. Later in "Medlars and Sorb Apples," the hysteria is increased and the observation becomes vision, and leaves, perhaps, the confines of poetry.

Orphic farewell, and farewell,
and farewell And the ego sum of Dionysos
  The sono io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final loneliness.

It became, in fact, ritual frenzy; a matter to which we shall return. But first let us examine the eighteen pages of the poems about tortoises. Here we have the honesty working the other way round. In "She Said as Well to Me" and in all the poems of Look! We Have Come Through! which make up Lawrence's testament of personal love, the movement is from the individual outward: it is the report or declaration, made unequivocally, of an enormously heightened sense of self. The self, the individual, is the radial point of sensibility. The six tortoise poems (which I take as the type of all the later poems) have as their motive the effort to seize on the plane of self-intoxication the sense of the outer world. The exhilarated knowledge of the self is still the aim, but here the self is the focal, not the radial, point of sensibility. The bias, the predicting twist of the mind, is no longer individual love, but the sexual, emergent character of all life; and in terms of that bias, which is the controlling principle, the seed of reality, in the hysteria of expression, Lawrence brings every notation and association, every symbolic suggestion he can find, to bear upon the shrieking plasm of the self. I quote the concluding lines of "Tortoise Shout."

The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence,
  Tearing a cry from us.

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
  Singing and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.

Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,

That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.¹

Here again the burden of honesty is translated or lost in the condition of ritual, of formal or declarative prayer and mystical identification; which is indeed a natural end for emotions of which the sustaining medium is hysteria. To enforce the point, let us take "Fish" (the poems of the four Evangelistic Beasts would do as well), which represented for Lawrence, in the different fish he observes, the absolute, untouchable, unknowable life, "born before God was love, or life knew loving," "who lies with the waters of his silent passion, womb-element," and of whom he can write, finally:

In the beginning
Jesus was called The Fish . . .
And in the end.

Per omnia saecula saeculorum. The Fish and likewise the Tortoise are acts of ceremonial adoration, in which the reader, if he is sympathetic, because of the intensity of the act, cannot help sharing. Lawrence was by consequence of the type of his insight and the kind of experience that excited him, a religious poet. His poetry is an attempt to declare and rehearse symbolically his pious recognition of the substance of life. The love of God for him was in the declaration of life in the flux of sex. Only with Lawrence the piety was tortured—the torture of incomplete affirmation. The great mystics saw no more profoundly than Lawrence through the disorder of life to their ultimate vision, but they saw within the terms of an orderly insight. In them, reason was stretched to include disorder and achieved mystery. In Lawrence, the reader is left to supply the reason and the form; for Lawrence only expresses the substance.

The affirmation to which the more important poems of Lawrence mount suffers from incompleteness for the same reasons that the lesser poems examined in the first part of this essay suffered. On the one hand he rejected the advantage of objective form for the immediate freedom of expressive form, and on the other hand he preferred the inspiration of immediate experience to the discipline of a rationally constructed imagination. He had a powerful sensibility and a profound experience, and he had the genius of insight and unequivocal honesty: he was in contact with the disorder of life. In his novels and tales the labor of creating and opposing characters, the exigencies of narrative, all the detail of execution, combined to make his works independent, controlled entities to a great extent. But in his poetry, the very intensity of his self-expression overwhelmed all other Considerations, and the disorder alone prevailed.

The point at issue, and the pity of it, can be put briefly. Lawrence the poet was no more hysterical in his expressive mode than the painter Van Gogh. But where Van Gogh developed enough art to control his expression objectively, and so left us great paintings, Lawrence developed as little art as possible, and left us the ruins of great intentions; ruins which we may admire and contemplate, but as they are ruins of a life merely, cannot restore as poetry. Art was too long for Lawrence; life too close.

NOTES

¹ May I suggest that the reader compare this passage from Lawrence with the following lines from T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday as a restorative to the sense of controlled hysteria. The two poems have nearly the same theme.

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and lifegiving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.