If a difficult problem were being set for what Mr. Bennett calls the "young aspirant" in criticism, there could scarcely be found a better topic than Mr. D. H. Lawrence. He is not the sort of man who becomes master of Balliol or an Oracle to thoughtful, cautious rentiers. His personality is abrupt, independent, and unreliable. His writings are full of faults and also of possible qualities. You can dislike him irrelevantly, because you have the Anglo-Saxon complex about sexual matters or because you share the pedant's follies about correctness and "models" or because you hate a man with a red beard. You may like him equally irrelevantly, because you share his lust for metaphysics, or because you think he has a working hypothesis of Love and Hate, or because he was stupidly persecuted during the war. But the point I wish to make about Mr. Lawrence's work in general, and his poetry in particular, is simply this; he is a great artist in words. And he is an artist almost unconsciously, certainly without troubling about it. To me it is a matter of indifference whether Mr. Lawrence's philosophical and psychological notions are accurate and original or not. (Who wants to argue Dante's theology or Tasso's history?) What I seek in poetry is poetry. In some of Mr. Lawrence's free verse I seem to find it.

Like many writers of wayward and independent genius, Mr. Lawrence has been more influenced by contemporaries—often far less gifted—than he or his professed admirers would admit. Take his three salient books of poetry, Amores, Look, We Have Come Through, and Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. The first is not a little Georgian; the second shows the influence of the Imagists; the third of the modern Americans. A tendency to redundant and merely decorative language in the first book is purged away in the next, which shows a tight discipline, and this is abandoned in turn for a reckless liberty and colloquialism in the last. But, in a larger sense, these are mere accidents of form, and are more interesting to other poets than to the public. The permanent interest of Mr. Lawrence's poetry lies in his essentially poetical way of seeing and feeling. That poetic mind is startlingly present in his novels. Even the preface to the "M. M." book contains that marvellous evocation of the Italian hill monastery; even the Dial articles gave us the vivid and penetrating dance of the Indians. These things live in one's mind with a special vitality of impression given us only by great poetry. And the wonderful thing is that this is given us, not by some long dead and consecrated master, but by a living man who has passed through the same great events as ourselves, whose work, therefore, has a peculiar poignancy and meaning for us, such as it will never have for the future which can only make up in reverence for prestige what we gain from intimacy and sympathy.

In judging poetry, remember Schlegel's "Internal excellence is alone decisive," and "there is no monopoly of poetry for particular ages and nations." What is it one admires in Mr. Lawrence's poetry? It seems to me he is one of the small number of men who think, feel, and live for themselves, a man intensely alert to the life of the senses and the mind, whose great purpose and pleasure are the explanation of himself and the universe. Add to this the talent for conveying these discoveries in poetic symbols. Mr. Lawrence lives poetically. I don't mean that he dresses a part or is languishing or literary or any of the stock libels of the ignorant; I mean that he apprehends the world directly by images. How useless is the discussion about Mr. Lawrence's "attitudes," and whether he has taken the wrong or the right philosophical path! D'abord il faut être poète. And a poet is the antithesis of the English gentleman, educated or the reverse. In our society, and in all over-organized societies, poetry either droops heavily and wearily or dances and giggles politely, or the poet becomes an outcast. Even Voltaire was an outcast in an unpoetical society. For it is the glory of a poet like Mr. Lawrence that he does not accept a readymade existence, that he scorns futile social laws, amusements, behavior, all herd-suggestions, and tastes the dangerous voluptuousness of living.

Take Mr. Lawrence's poems and observe how absolutely free his mind and body are; his revolt against stale, tame lives is perhaps too vehement and scornful, but how comprehensible! See the pallid senses, the cautious, confined spiritual and mental life of our tame intellectuals and arrivistes, and then observe the sensual richness, the emotional variety, of Mr. Lawrence. "Better to see straight on a pound a week, than squint on a million," said Mr. G. B. Shaw; and better, how much better, to starve and suffer and endure pangs of intolerable pleasure and bitter disappointment and ecstasies for the love of beauty with Lawrence, an outcast, a wanderer, than to live in the dull monotony of comfort. "The world's good word, the Institute!" All that a man like Lawrence asks of the world is to be left alone; it is all the world can do for him.

Now that ecstasy for life and beauty blows through Mr. Lawrence, as he says, "like a fine wind," and he has an almost mystic sense of loyalty to his talent:

If only I let it bear me, carry me,
if only it carry me! If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
  The rock shall split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

"Sensitive, subtle, delicate," these Mr. Lawrence is indeed in his poetry, though he has other and uglier moods, the worst of which is the poetical equivalent to that little mocking titter of his—a useful thing, though, to keep him hard and unsentimental. Perhaps that sense of mockery has been as valuable as his fearlessness in exploring and expressing a whole country of emotions into which nearly all contemporary English poets are afraid to penetrate. They are eaten up with the disease of self-love and respectability. Mr. Lawrence is a poet as untramelled as an Elizabethan. To me he seems one of the last authentic voices of the great but decaying English people. Angry revolt against the grey, servile, querulous, futile, base personalities of the world, stabs Mr. Lawrence to almost hysterical denunciation:

I long to see its chock-full crowdedness
And glutted squirming populousness on fire
Like a field of filthy weeds
  Burnt back to ash
  And then to see the new, real souls spring up.

I do not think that Mr. Lawrence is at his best in such passages, but they have a sinister significance for those who understand the meaning of poetry in human life. It should be sinister, at least for modern society to know that its best poets despair of it utterly, as they do. Life, said Marcus Aurelius, may be lived well even in a palace; but in a ruthless, mechanistic commercialism—? If the poetry of D. H. Lawrence is largely a revolt, it is a revolt against a non-human scale of values.