SOURCE: "A Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way to Live," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Summer, 1958, pp. 191-200.

Snodgrass was an American poet, educator, and critic, whose books included the highly-regarded poetry collection Heart's Needle (1959). In the following essay, one of the seminal studies of "The Rocking-Horse Winner, " he explores the use of symbols in the story and comments on Lawrence's philosophy of sex and life and how these ideas impact the tale.

"The Rocking-Horse Winner" seems the perfect story by the least meticulous of serious writers. It has been anthologized, analyzed by New Critics and force-fed to innumerable undergraduates. J. Arthur Rank has filmed it. Yet no one has seriously investigated the story's chief structural feature, the symbolic extensions of the rocking-horse itself, and I feel that in ignoring several meaningareas of this story we ignore some of Lawrence's most stimulating thought.

Though the...