THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

ases for social relationships. This restlessness is more adventurously, more personally, and somewhat less
dangerously explored in the series of travel-books written in his post-war Wanderjahre: Sea and Sardinia (1921),
Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932). Each traces a different affinity and a distinct fascination.
His final large-scale fictional experiment, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, emphatically returned to an England crushed and
emasculated by the war. It is an ambitious work which inveighs against materialism, intellectualism, and priggism
while lovingly delineating the worship of Priapus and composing poetic liturgies to accompany copulation. Lady
Chatterley’s Lover was not published in an unexpurgated form until 1960 and only then after a failed prosecution
under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. In a sense the book’s uncensored reappearance belatedly ushered in a
new literary decade, one in which Lawrence’s literary reputation and his moral influence reached their zenith.
Old and New Writing: Practitioners, Promoters, and the ‘Little Magazines’
‘The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and unlovely actualities’, D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1916, ‘is a stark
directness without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere.’ Such ‘stark, bare, rocky directness of
statement’, Lawrence believed, constituted the only true poetic expression in an age marked by a disillusion with
outmoded forms and by the cultural fragmentation imposed by the war. Lawrence was the only English-born poet of
Modernist leanings who had published verse before 1914 to survive that war. His verse has always been difficult to
classify. His poetry appeared both in the influential, but essentially conservative, volumes, of Georgian Poetry and in
far more radical company in two of the anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916). His distinctively
‘direct’ and intense poetry sits somewhat uneasily beside the shapely, rhymed realism of the Georgians but, given that
its subjects are most frequently derived from an observation of nature, it is not really out of place. Writing to Edward
Marsh (1872-1953), the editor of Georgian Poetry, in 1913 Lawrence insisted that it was not the ‘obvious form’ or
the subject that made poetry but the ‘hidden emotional pattern’. His patterning, he explained, was not likely to appeal
immediately to ears conditioned by the smooth traditions of late-Romanticism against which he had declared war.
Later, in the Foreword to his volume Pansies (1929) he argues for a form that conveyed the tightness of thought; ‘a
real thought’, he suggests, ‘a single thought, not an argument, can only exist easily in verse’, and, in what reads
almost like perverse admission of personal culpability, he confesses that ‘there is a didactic element about prose
thoughts which makes them repellent, slightly bullying’.
Much of Lawrence’s best poetry, concentrated, stark and unrhymed, appeared in the volume Birds, Beasts and
Flowers in 1923. In the poem ‘Figs’, for
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example, he offers an analysis of a fruit which veers suggestively between the culinary, the botanical, the symbolical,
and the sexual (‘Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward’). Elsewhere in the volume, analysis is subsumed
in an attempt on the poet’s part to feel himself into the life of an animal or to identify with the intensity of life he
observes in growing and moving things. Each poem represents an attempt to become familiar with, but never to
domesticate, the exotic. He associates himself with the cypresses of Tuscany which seem to hold the dark secret of the
dead Etruscans (‘Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria, | Whom Rome called vicious’)
(‘Cypresses’), while wild cyclamens observed in a Sicilian dawn have a vivid particularity of their own, appearing
‘like delicate very-young greyhound bitches | Half yawning at the open, inexperienced | Vista of day, | Folding back
their soundless petalled ears’ (‘Sicilian Cyclamens’). A male tortoise screaming as it mounts a female (‘Tortoise
Shout’ ) seems to stand for all life that cries out either in pain or in ecstasy while a Sydney kangaroo, watching with
‘eternal, cocked wistfulness’, is taken as representative of the distinctive quality of Australian nature, both human and
animal. In ‘Snake’, the transfixed poet watches, with an emotion that confuses honour, fear, gratitude, and mystery,
as a snake drinks at his water-trough. When he frightens away the snake by throwing a log at it, the thrill is
superseded by a new sense of guilt which is at once ‘literary’ and primitive and profound:
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.