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Lawrence's Collected Poems: The Demon Takes Over

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Phyllis Bartlett
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Extract

It is well known that D. H. Lawrence was an unsparing rewriter of his fiction, and the tradition persists that “he could never revise, he could only rewrite.” Yet, although he rewrote a number of poems, as he did his short stories and novels, he revised many more—nearly all of them, in fact, either before or after publication. His most concentrated period of activity as a poetic reviser was the winter of 1927–28, when he collected his poems for the publisher Martin Seeker, and he remarked at this time that he felt “like an autumn morning, a perfect maze of gossamer of rhythms and rhymes and loose lines floating in the air.” No wonder he felt this way, for he had been altering rhythms, rhymes, single words, and punctuation in addition to rewriting whole stanzas and sometimes whole poems. In a few weeks he altered the face of his early poems as drastically as the arch-revisers Wordsworth and Tennyson altered theirs in the course of many years.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 5 , September 1951 , pp. 583 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 583 Except that “The Song of a Man Who is Loved,” which the publisher of Look! We Have Come Through had omitted, was restored in Collected Poems. See Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius But. . . (New York, 19S0), p. 163, for the original text.

Note 2 in page 584 Amores (London, 1925), p. 38; Collected Poems, 2 vols. (London, 1928), i, 98 (this work hereafter referred to as C.P.).

Note 3 in page 585 (New York, 1923), p. 5; C.P., ii, 129 retitled “Figs.”

Note 4 in page 586 There had been two rhymes in stave vii of the version in the English Review.

Note 5 in page 586 Comparably, he turned the 13-line sketch, “Baby-Movements: 1. Running Barefoot” (Eng. Rev., iii, 565), into a sonnet with Shakespearian rhyme scheme: “Baby Running Barefoot” (C.P., i, 59).

Note 6 in page 587 Richard Aldington, in D. ?. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius But... (p. 77), used the final version of this poem to make a point about Lawrence's attitude to his pupils, and perhaps Jessie Chambers, at the time the poem was first written. But the thesis of this paper indicates that future students of Lawrence who are using the poems as biographical material should always quote the version that appeared nearest the time under discussion, not neglecting magazine versions, which furnish many surprises.

Note 7 in page 589 Love Poems and Others (London, 1913), p. xxxiii; C.P., i“, 66.

Note 8 in page 591 New Poems (New York, 1920), p. 65; C.P., i, 198.