The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence [Paperback]

D. H. Lawrence (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 5, 1994 | ISBN-10: 1853264172 | ISBN-13: 978-1853264177

Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930. It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd (September 5, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1853264172
• ISBN-13: 978-1853264177
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 7.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #458,789 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One long poetic journal, June 4, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Paperback)

Lawrence's poems have never been among my favorites. I think one reason is that they have been so flowing and evanescent, have not come to some critical point in great memorable lines. They are spontaneous outpourings and make a record of his inner life and struggle. And in this inner life he feels into nature and makes the things of this world, animals, trees, plants feel his feelings and respond as him to him. The strange sympathy which overflows in Lawrence makes him unique as a poet.

Joyce Carol Oates in a long instructive critical essay on Lawrence explains part of his poetic practice this way.

"Lawrence's poems are blunt, exasperating, imposing upon us his strangely hectic, strangely delicate music, in fragments, in tantalizing broken-off parts of a whole too vast to be envisioned--and then withdrawing again. They are meant to be spontaneous works, spontaneously experienced; they are not meant to give us the sense of grandeur or permanence that other poems attempt, the fallacious sense of immortality that is an extension of the poet's ego. Yet they achieve a kind of immortality precisely in this: that they transcend the temporal, the intellectual. They are ways of experiencing the ineffable "still point" that Eliot could approach only through abstract language.

"It is illuminating to read Lawrence's entire poetic work as a kind of journal, in which not only the finished poems themselves but variants and early drafts and uncollected poems constitute a strange unity--an autobiographical novel, perhaps--that begins with "The quick sparks . . ." and ends with "immortal bird." This massive work is more powerful, more emotionally combative, than even the greatest of his novels. Between first and last line there is literally everything: beauty, waste, "flocculent ash," the ego in a state of rapture and in a state of nausea, a diverse streaming of chaos and cunning."

Lawrence so restless so individual could not bear the constrictions of traditional poetic form, and he stretches the free verse technique of Whitman even further, bending its broken lines to the shape of his own soul.

I think Oates has its right, and Lawrence is not properly read by reading a poem here and there, but only by immersing oneself in the total flow of his work.

Again his soul and feeling and world are not mine but it is impossible not to feel the poetry interfused in almost all he writes.

12 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just..., October 21, 2009

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Chalksauce (France) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Works of D.H. Lawrence (Twelve Books with active table of contents) (Kindle Edition)

Nice product, I would just like to say it's a shame it didn't include "Lady Chatterley's lover" as well, and perhaps more short stories, which would have made this edition more complete. Also, do not let the other review mislead you, as it is about a different book. This one contains no poetry, that I can tell.

4 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Arrogant Blasphemy., October 28, 2011

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dream factory (Triangulum, M33) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Paperback)

Allow me to take one stanza from six different D H Lawrence poems.

"stand up, but not for Jesus".

"if you want justice, let it be demon justice".

"oh Madonna mia! Shabby virgin".

"oh be a demon outside of class".

"since the Lamb bewitched Luke with that red flag".

"Jesus one of nature's phenomena".

What's wrong with this eunuch? You expect me to read any of his poems and marvel at their beauty? if I may use Lawrence's own verbiage to review this book;

"gross! coarse! hideous! silly!".

"leaving nasty film upon you every time".

"an anti-climax, humiliating and ridiculous".

Then we get a real sence of what this guys about on page 515;

"I feel absolute reverence to nobody, and to nothing human, neither to persons nor things nor ideas, ideals nor religious institutions". . . . . . Gee D.H. You sure sound alot like my do nothing know it all slob friend Frank. You know the type. The eternally unemployed philosopher with a beer can in hand.

Oh, my review? : : An uneven collection of tuneless impotent poems by an incestuous withered womanless coward afraid of the raw lyrical power of Eliot and Pound.