The earlier poetry of D. H. Lawrence: a variorum text, comprising all extant incunabula and published poems up to and including the year 1919

Abstract

This Text includes all the poetry Lawrence wrote from the time of his first early and fragmentary attempts at verse to his departure from England in late 1919. However I have not concentrated upon the earlier poetry simply because the later work is a less fruitful area for this kind of approach. The ‘penumbra’ of experimentation round the published poetry turned out to be much more than I anticipated when embarking upon this study, and since it became clearly impossible to include the whole of Lawrence’s poetic oeuvre it was felt that a complete record of the early period would be preferable to a selective one of the whole. Nevertheless, a few representative examples of poems written later than 1919 are included to emphasise that the drastic and repeated revision of the poems which this Variorum Text illustrates was a feature of Lawrence’s poetic practice throughout his life, and that the current of feeling continued to be led into various “conduits and canals” however much is may give the impression of spontaneous overflow.