| Title | : | The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 704 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1964 |
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.
The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence Reviews
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The Great American Sage Don Jones introduced me to D,H. Lawrence poetry in 2000 and D.H. is one of the greatest gifts I have received in understanding the depth and breath of the sacred masculine's longing for wholeness in our world ~ true love, natural beauty and authenticity in interactions with others. This is a complete digest of D.H.'s poetic angst, insights and blessings in modernity that reveals a new wonderful landscape of wholeness in humanity and horizons in the human heart for all of us to explore within. I keep this book on my classic top shelf and ready at hand everyday for inspiration.
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Reading the works by Lawrence in prose is certainly a pleasure well-extracted. However, once you read the poems written by him, you come to know him closely, better and in vivid perspectives of his personality. Reading poems by Lawrence taught me that he was close to the truth - the truth that everything is there either eternal or ephemeral in totality. Nothing is aloof. This might be my personal interpretation but I am sure many readers might have come close to it as well. This collection is complete.
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What is it about Lawrence and sex? Even the tortoises are having intercourse in this collection of poetry.
And let me just say, Lawrence, the bunny poem, dude, really?
That aside, or maybe because of it, many of the poems in the collection are good. Even if Lawrence had never written any of his novels, many of these poems might have earned a place in literature as well. He covers more than sex, but politics and the hope and contradiction that is America. There is much about gender roles and relationships here as well.
He mediates on a mountain lion he saw killed and carried by someone, and the mediation turns into which is worth more – humankind or the power and beauty of the cat. If you have ever had a dog or cat that met a blue jay, you will love the poem of the same name.
There is something more honest about these poems than about his novels, a nakedness that doesn’t quite appear in the long works. In some ways, though the poetry, Lawrence shows himself as a follower of Wordsworth, a descendent of all those romantics. -
love
'One thing is certain, we've got to take hands off love.
the moment i swear to love a woman all my life that very moment i begin to hate her.
In the same way, if i swore to hate a woman all my life, I should instantly feel a pang of compunction
Amounting almost to love.' D. H. Lawrence -
Deeply carnal, firmly rooted in the physical world, sensuous & voluptuous - often to excess.
These are highly personal & self-revelatory poems - you learn, amongst others, that D.H. Lawrence's outlook on women is dubious: he either idealizes them, or blames them for his lack of sexual fulfilment, or he’s being downright hateful towards them. Poems such as "Last Words to Miriam", "Manifesto" or "Figs" are very telling in that regard. At times, Lawrence uses his poetry to air his grievances with the world, be it women, money, capitalism etc. Some poems are striking, some are raw rants only, less accomplished. There’s a fair amount of debris in here, in all honesty, but there’s also great stuff.
Some favourite titles:
"Love on the Farm"
"Coldness in Love"
"Piano"
"Seven Seals"
"Two Wives"
"Craving for Spring"
"Snake"
"Bavarian Gentians"
“Elemental”
"Dreams Old and Nascent: Nascent"
"Song of a Man who Has Come Through"
"Trust"
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“Since you are confined in the orbit of me
do you not loathe the confinement?
Is not even the beauty and peace of an orbit
an intolerable prison to you,
as it is to everybody?”
(from Both Sides of the Medal)
“I wish that spring
would start the thundering traffic of feet
new feet on the earth, beating with impatience.”
(from Craving for Spring)
“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken,
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”
(from Pomegranate) -
Far better than his far more famous novels. Bitter and randy but often sensational, bringing flowers
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride
a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again
and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark
among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding
fathomless darkness on the nuptials.
There's about 6 duds for every one of those - as always, a Collected is never judged by its hit rate but by its best. His philosophy is rank nonsense ("Sexless people transmit nothing."; "The machine shall be abolished from the earth again; / it is a mistake that mankind has made;") - as always, this has no bearing on the poems. What do I care that he is the most unsound voice in the great unsound choir of English literature?
See
here,
here,
here,
here,
here.
The dirt-cheap
holly-green Wordsworth paperbacks are where I got my first education. (I think this is what older generations got via Dover Thrifts or Pelicans.) -
SCRUMPTIOUS. love it. j'adore. top five best poets. favourites include 'fidelity', 'hummingbird', 'snap-dragon', 'red geranium and godly mignonette', and 'lizard'.
'I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Hummingbirds raced down the avenues.
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.
I believe there were no flowers then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of eternity.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long
telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.' -
This is one I've picked up off and on over many years. My favorite is the little poem
Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
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Now, I could say that it is not a poem, but just a piece of observation which sticks in my memory. Which, I suppose, could be a definition of poetry after all. -
Sorrow
Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?
Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,
I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I watched them float up the dark chimney. -
Did I read every poem? Of course not. A lot of foolishness is in here. Many of Lawrence’s poems are more like rhymed prose (not necessarily a bad thing) than poems because the rhymes occur so irregularly and the lines are so metrically flat. His most famous poems—Snake, Bavarian Gentians, Ship of Death—are free verse, but I find many of the short rhyming lyrics quite delightful.
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"And I think in this empty world
there was room for me and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond,
how easily we might spare a million or two humans
And never miss them." -
I'm not entirely sure that every poem in here needed to be published, but it was a complete collection and read over the course of many, many months, worth the effort in my opinion.
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"The Piano" is my absolute favorite poem. I treasure this collection and keep it on my nightstand.
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Truthfully, I only read volume #2. Diatribes, complaints, polemics, rants, moments of tongue-and-cheek. Satirical. Where's the depth, the craft, the attention to lyricism?
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In all honesty, his poetry is okay-ish. I think there are far better modernist poets to choose from. He has some good essays, though! I recommend Studies is Classic American Literature. :)
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bro please stop talking about ur cock
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Admittedly a fair few of these are quite raw, but there's plenty of wisdom and interest particularly for the Lawrence aficionado.
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He was fine as a young romantic poet, then he turned rude and misogynistic.
War, machinery, failed ideas and relationships appear in his poems later, and Lawrence turns against himself. -
ĻOTI snobiski
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D.H. Lawrence's poems are intensely expressive. My personal favorite of his poems in this large collection is the very last, "Phoenix". For those interested in Metaphysics - especially Sufism or even Buddhism - they will appreciate the words of the poem "dipped into oblivion" [fanaa' in sufic nomenclature].
Overall I adore the work! It also includes poems regarding politics, love, morality, religion, justice, etiquette and even subtle satire :)
Here are some short selections:
Souls to Save
You tell me every man has a soul to save?
I tell you, not one man in a thousand has even a soul to lose.
The automat has no soul to lose
so it can't have one to save.
Change:
Do you think it is easy to change?
Ah, it is very hard to change and be different.
It means passing through the waters of oblivion.
Sleep:
Sleep is the shadow of death, but not only that.
Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.
When I am gone, completely lapsed and gone
and healed from all this ache of being. -
Though Lawrence is mainly known as a novelist, he has written huge number of poems. His poetry is deep and digs into the consciousness of human nature and also mythical connections.
Some of the poetry of Lawrence was translated unto Arabic, and I have rendered his poem "Ship of Death" into Arabic as far ago as 1964. -
4.9 stars!
There's a rose in that man's prose! And a Poe in his Poems. Most talented Modernist? Maybe. Lawrence wrote five fantastic novels. Wrote my favorite short story ever- "The Rocking Horse Winner". Wrote my favorite poem ever-"The Wild Common" is worth the price of this collection. Resplendent rhymes. Yes, they rhyme. Takes the prize. -
I read some of his short stories and poems in highschool and thought they were dark and depressing with few redeeming qualities. I appreciate the attempt at defining the "human condition", but it just gets depressing and old after a while.
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Awesome Poet!!!! Here is one of the poems I loved. It's short.
Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing/
sorry for itself./
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
