D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

Lawrence was not a great poet — if only because poetry was not his main concern as a writer; he was not a good poet in the technical sense. Yet he had touches of greatness, as in a few poems where his dignity as a man transcends the irritation and maladjustment which characterized his normal relations with life. In Bavarian Gentians, for instance, he attains to something of the earnestness and composure which seem to go with true greatness. He might have been a good poet had he been less himself. Impatience with poetic technique was, however, a part of him. He had not the craftsman’s sense of words as living things, as an end in themselves; words were too much a means to an end. What that end was will be considered.