SOURCE: Draper, R. P. “The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence.” In D. H. Lawrence: New Studies, edited by Christopher Heywood, pp. 16-33. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Draper offers a critical overview of the range of Lawrence's poetry and its evolution in subject matter, structure, and tone.

As Richard Hoggart pointed out some time ago (in a review of The Complete Poems [CP] published in the Listener, 29 October 1964), there is a wide variety of tone in Lawrence's poetry, but in the main it falls into two kinds: the vatic or rapturous (which Hoggart calls the ‘prophetic or mystical voice’) and the more down-to-earth, colloquially familiar voice of his working-class background. Some readers might wish to identify the dialect poems as belonging to a third kind; and yet a fourth group—nostalgic in tone and fin de sièce in style—might be...