Critical Essay | Critical Review by Adrienne Rich

Critical Review by Adrienne Rich

SOURCE: Rich, Adrienne. “Reflections on Lawrence.” Poetry 106, no. 3 (June 1965): 218-25.

In the following review of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, Rich suggests that this collection is essential to understanding the depth and breadth of Lawrence's significance as a major poet.

“Thought,” he says in More Pansies, “is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.” Have his readers wholly attended to him? “But, my dear God, when I see all the understanding and suffering and the pure intelligence necessary for the simple perceiving of poetry, then I know it is an almost hopeless business to publish the stuff at all,” he wrote to Harriet Monroe. It seems scarcely possible that the old charges of hysteria, anti-craftmanship, can still be leveled, that his own references to “the demon” (in the Preface to the Collected Poems, 1928) can still be misread. (“From the first, I was a little...
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