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Practitioner Criticism: Poetry

This chapter places Lawrence’s poetics, as developed in his poetry, in relation to his responses to other poets and poetic tendencies or movements, such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Aestheticism as well as contemporary free verse, Realism and Imagism. Lawrence knew and corresponded with many poets throughout his career, from Yeats and Pound to Amy Lowell and H. D. The extent to which he assimilated or resisted such diverse influences is the focus of this re-evaluation of Lawrence’s paradoxical status as an outsider inside. His poetics elude simple definition. So dissimilar are the kinds of verse to which Lawrence responded that his general openness to old and new voices, alike, helps account not only for this maverick status, but for the sheer variety of verse forms practiced in his poetry. Through the poetry of Whitman, Lawrence recovered the sense of ‘wonder’ that he had felt as a child hearing the Bible and listening to church hymns. Poetry also became a form of play. He soon discovered, too, how much work, or ‘groping’, was entailed in writing and resisted falsifying perfection. Double-edged, the ‘jagged’ edges perceived by Conrad Aiken became a signature trait. Dialectical and conflictual relationalism inflects his Whitmanesque style.