SOURCE: "Comment: Reflections on Lawrence," in Poetry, Vol. 106, 1965, pp. 218-25.

In the following review of The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Rich assesses Lawrence as a major poet, finding evidence that Lawrence deliberately reduced many poems to doggerel for effect, and arguing that Lawrence is the English language's best love poet since William Shakespeare.

"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-craftsmanship, can still be leveled, that his own references to "the demon" (in the Preface to the Collected Poems...