Last Poems

by D.H. Lawrence

All of Lawrence's last poems collected in one volume. THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED Catalogue of the Lamont Library, Harvard College.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

316 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uneven, flawed and petty at times, this collection nonetheless pulls the weight of a minor planet in terms of Lawrence's cosmology, his theology and his occasionally scathing remarks on British culture. The best of the poems include his "Bavarian Gentians," in which the layered repetitions of blue and black envelope the dark halls of Dis just as the petals of the gentian flower draw us in to descend to the bride's bed below. "Ship of Death" describes the Etruscan sarcophagus fitted with a small gold ship on the front of the casket and the ways in which that ship embodies a desire to pass through death and to be reborn. Lawrence is working out his heavenly order, and it doesn't always fly. Like when he's attempting to warn us of the dangers of the machine age:

"All men are worshippers
unless they have fallen, and have become robots"

and again...

"And men that sit in machines
among spinning wheels, in an apotheosis of wheels
sit in the grey mist of movement which moves not"

or when he's criticizing British culture:

"The food of the north tastes too much of the fat of the pig
fat of the pig!

Take me south again, to the olive trees
and oil me with the lymph of silvery trees
oil me with the lymph of trees
not with the fat of the pig."

Yes, that's an entire poem. Many of these poems are short sketches, observations, brief fleeting thoughts. But they were written in a short period as Lawrence was dying from consumption, and the amount of energy, the bold recklessness and the casual, direct tone that surfaces are strangely refreshing. Mixed among the less-successful poems are gems that sparkle with wit, music and poetic invention.

Even when Lawrence is at his wryest and bleakest, his poems are not without an attending mordant humor:

"Tourists

There is nothing to look at any more.
everything has been seen to death."

And at his best, he is simply sublime:

"The White Horse

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world."

[Helle · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5)