SOURCE: Gregory, Horace. “The Georgian Poet: 1909-1919.” In D. H. Lawrence: Pilgrim of the Apocalypse, pp. 1-16. New York, N.Y.: Grove Press, 1933.

In the following essay, Gregory examines the works of D. H. Lawrence that appeared or were written between 1909 and 1919.

Some effort is required to get at the Lawrence of the early poems, to get behind the beard of the prophet, the half-closed eyes and the red, V-shaped, pointed smile. The early poems belong to a white-skinned boy, back in Nottinghamshire, a boy who had the clean, water-translucent stare of an H. G. Wellsian hero. All this, of course, was long before the war and he was a Georgian poet before the Georgians appeared.

In a note placed as a preface to his Collected Poems (1928) Lawrence was a bit uneasy about these early poems first printed as Love Poems and Others and Amores. He went to...