SOURCE: Ellman, Richard. “Barbed Wire and Coming Through.” In The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore, pp. 253-67. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.

In the following essay, Ellman explores the “healing” elements of Lawrence's poetry and the development of poetic voice through revision.

Lawrence wrote his poetry, and much of his prose, as a healer. This description is not pejorative; it ranks him, as Auden has suggested, with Blake; it ranks him with Auden himself, and with the later Pound. It dissociates him from Yeats, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, whose poetry aims first at being visionary rather than therapeutic. Healing has two aspects: the patient must know first that he has a wound which needs to be searched. Here Lawrence's Pansies (with his suggestion that he connects the word with panser) and Nettles establish his diagnostic skill, in the...