SOURCE: Salgado, Gamini. Review of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. The Critical Quarterly 7, no. 5 (winter 1965): 389-92.

In the following review of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, Salgado briefly traces the general tenor of critical assessment of Lawrence's poetry.

“In England, they have that loathsome superior knack of refusing to consider me a poet at all—‘your prose is so good’ say the kind fools, ‘that we are obliged to forgive you your poetry’. How I hate them.”

The fifty years that have passed since Lawrence's outburst have done little to alter the general attitude to his poetry; if anything, the original opposition has hardened into something like a dogma. Edith Sitwell called him, amusingly, the Jaeger poet, all hot and woolly; Ezra Pound saw the early poems (except those in dialect) as pre-Raphaelite slush and achieved a one-line parody of a long sequence: ‘I...