SOURCE: Janik, Del Ivan. “D. H. Lawrence's ‘Future Religion’: The Unity of Last Poems.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16, no. 4 (winter 1975): 739-54.

In the following essay, Janik considers the posthumously-published Last Poems of Lawrence, asserting that they are among the finest of the poet's works.

Several of the poems that D. H. Lawrence wrote in the last months of his life are considered to be among his finest, and among the finest English poems of the century; but it has not been observed that the posthumously published notebook that includes “Bavarian Gentians” and “The Ship of Death” is a unified and cohesively organized work that extends Lawrence's most fundamental religious perceptions into one of his major literary accomplishments. In his introduction to Lawrence's Last Poems, first published by Giuseppe Orioli in 1932, Richard Aldington lamented the fact that the poet had not lived to complete his work: “He...