SOURCE: Del Ivan Janik, "D. H. Lawrence's 'Future Religion': The Unity of Last Poems," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XLV, No. 4, Winter, 1975, pp. 739-54.

In the following essay, Janik explicates Lawrence's posthumously published poems 'Bavarian Gentians" and "The Ship of Death" among others to support claims that Lawrence is among the major poets of the twentieth century.

Several of the poems that D. H. Lawrence wrote in the last months of his life are considered to be among his finest, and among the finest English poems of the century; but it has not been observed that the posthumously published notebook that includes "Bavarian Gentians" and "The Ship of Death" is a unified and cohesively organized work that extends Lawrence's most fundamental religious perceptions into one of his major literary accomplishments. In his introduction to Lawrence's Last Poems, first published by Giuseppe Orioli in 1932, Richard Aldington...