ABSTRACT
The fact that Lawrence is without question a great poetic novelist has had the unfortunate effect that his poetry has been either neglected, patronized or dismissed. With the exception of anthology pieces such as ‘Snake’ and ‘Piano’ very few of Lawrence's poems are anything like as well known as they deserve to be. He himself noted this fact with some annoyance. ‘In England,’ he wrote to a Croydon friend in 1914, ‘people have got that loathsome superior knack of refusing to consider me a poet at all.’ ‘Your prose is so good’, say the kind fools, ‘that we are obliged to forgive you your poetry. How I hate them.’ In 1914, Lawrence had published only one book of poems, Love Poems and Others. By the end of his life he had added nine more volumes, so that we have far less excuse to neglect his poetry than those reviewers and critics who were writing at the outset of Lawrence's career. This brief survey of his poetry may aptly begin by noting that he was writing verse before he was quite out of his teens and continued to do so until his death. In his Introduction to the Collected Poems of 1928 Lawrence wrote:
The first poems I ever wrote, if poems they were, was when I was nineteen: now twenty three years ago. I remember perfectly the Sunday afternoon when I perpetrated those first two pieces: ‘To Guelder Roses’ and ‘To Campions’; in spring-time, of course, and, as I say, in my twentieth year. Any young lady might have written them and been pleased with them; as I was pleased with them.
