ABSTRACT
To date, reference is most often made to The Complete Poems edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, which itself refers to collections published by Heinemann as well as a range of other printed and manuscript sources. De Sola Pinto and Roberts bring together key prefaces, introductions and forewords to his volumes of poetry by Lawrence. It is not possible here to examine all of Lawrence’s poetry in the kind of detail it deserves and so the focus will be on three of his books – Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) and Pansies (1929) – and some prefaces. His public life began properly, as we have seen, with the publication of poems in the English Review edited by Ford Madox Hueffer [11]. After that, the books are Love Poems and Others (1913), Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through!, New Poems (1918), Bay (1919), Tortoises (1921) Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Collected Poems (1928), Pansies, Nettles (1930). Last Poems was published posthumously in 1932, edited by Richard Aldington [16]. Identifying Lawrence and James Joyce as the twin cardinals of modern writing Aldington risks a comparison which the contemporary reader might like to review: ‘The great difference … is that Joyce’s writing is founded on the conception of Being, and Lawrence’s on the conception of Becoming’ (CP 593).
