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    The Poems
    The Poems
    The Poems
    Ebook1,820 pages23 hours

    The Poems

    By D H Lawrence

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    About this ebook

    A collection of modern English poetry from the celebrated author of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

    This definitive collection of D. H. Lawrence’s poems, both previously published and some not, presents here with the poems in their intended forms, reversing censorship and correcting long-missed errors for the first time. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive study of the composition, publication and reception of Lawrence’s most iconic poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 20, 2019
    ISBN9780795351624
    The Poems
    Author

    D H Lawrence

    David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.

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      Book preview

      The Poems - D H Lawrence

      The Poems

      D. H. Lawrence

      The Poems

      Cambridge Edition of the text copyright © 2013, the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli

      Introduction and notes copyright © 2013, Cambridge University Press

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Cover design by Alexia Garaventa

      Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

      ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5162-4

      www.RosettaBooks.com

      THE

      CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF

      THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF

      D. H. LAWRENCE

      THE WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

      EDITORIAL BOARD

      GENERAL EDITOR

      James T. Boulton

      M. H. Black

      Paul Poplawski

      John Worthen

      A version of ‘Piano’ in a notebook (Roberts E320.2 or MS45), composed in spring 1918 and probably illustrated during a summer visit of Ada Lawrence Clarke and her family to Mountain Cottage, Derbyshire. By courtesy of Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham.

      ‘The Greeks are coming!’ and ‘The Argonauts’, composed October 1929, opening page of ‘The Last Poems Notebook’ (Roberts E192a or MS185). By courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

      CONTENTS

      General editor’s preface

      Acknowledgements

      Chronology

      Introduction

      Collections and Cue-titles

      A   Poetry collections by D. H. Lawrence

      B   Cue-titles of other works by D. H. Lawrence

      C   Cue-titles of works by others

      D   Abbreviations of names

      E   Manuscript locations

      THE POEMS

      Collected Poems Rhyming Poems

      All of Us

      Collected Poems Unrhyming Poems

      Look! We Have Come Through!

      Birds, Beasts and Flowers

      Pansies

      Nettles

      The ‘Nettles’ Notebook

      The Last Poems Notebook

      Composition, Publication, Reception

      From first poetry notebook to Love Poems and Others

      Publication of Love Poems and Others (1913)

      Early reception, including Love Poems and Others

      Early composition of poems for Look! We Have Come Through!

      Serial and anthology publications, 1912–1917

      Revision and publication of Amores (1916)

      Reception of Amores

      Composition of ‘All of Us’, ‘Bits’ and ‘War Films’, 1916–1919

      Revision and publication of Look! We Have Come Through! (1917)

      Reception of Look! We Have Come Through!

      Composition and revision of New Poems and Bay

      Publication of New Poems (1918)

      Reception of New Poems

      Publication of Bay [1920]

      Early composition of Tortoises and Birds, Beasts and Flowers

      Publication of Tortoises (1921)

      Reception of Tortoises

      Further composition and revision of Birds, Beasts and Flowers

      Publication of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923)

      Reception of Birds, Beasts and Flowers

      The idea of a Collected Poems

      The making of Collected Poems

      Publication of Collected Poems (1928)

      Reception of Collected Poems

      Composition and censorship of Pansies

      Revision of Pansies

      Getting Pansies published

      Publication of the English expurgated Pansies (1929)

      Serial, unexpurgated and American publication of Pansies (1929)

      Unexpurgated Pansies: ordinary and special copies (1929–1930)

      Unexpurgated Pansies: laid paper copies (1929–1930)

      Introductions and Forewords for Pansies

      Reception of Pansies

      Composition of ‘The Nettles Notebook’ [‘More Pansies’] and Nettles

      Publication of Nettles (1930)

      Reception of Nettles

      Composition of ‘The Last Poems Notebook’

      Publication of ‘The Nettles Notebook’ and ‘The Last Poems Notebook’ in Last Poems (1932)

      Reception of Last Poems

      Later history of Last Poems

      The current situation

      Textual notes, Textual apparatus, Explanatory notes

      Symbols and abbreviations

      Conventions in Textual notes, Textual apparatus and Explanatory notes

      Silent emendations

      Rhyming Poems

      All of Us

      Look! We Have Come Through!

      Birds, Beasts and Flowers

      Pansies

      Nettles

      The Nettles Notebook

      The Last Poems Notebook

      Appendices

      1     Preface to New Poems

      2     Foreword to Collected Poems

      3     Note to Collected Poems

      4     Draft Introduction to Pansies

      5     Second Draft Introduction to Pansies

      6     Introduction to Pansies

      7     Unused Foreword to Pansies

      8     Foreword to Pansies

      Textual Notes Appendices

      Appendix 1 Preface to New Poems

      Appendix 2 Foreword to Collected Poems

      Appendix 3 Note to Collected Poems

      Appendix 4 Draft Introduction to Pansies

      Appendix 5 Second Draft Introduction to Pansies

      Appendix 6 Introduction to Pansies

      Appendix 7 Unused Foreword to Pansies

      Appendix 8 Foreword to Pansies

      A note on pounds, shillings and pence

      GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

      D. H. Lawrence is one of the great writers of the twentieth century – yet the texts of his writings, whether published during his lifetime or since, are, for the most part, textually corrupt. The extent of the corruption is remarkable; it can derive from every stage of composition and publication. We know from study of his MSS that Lawrence was a careful writer, though not rigidly consistent in matters of minor convention. We know also that he revised at every possible stage. Yet he rarely if ever compared one stage with the previous one, and overlooked the errors of typists or copyists. He was forced to accept, as most authors are, the often stringent house-styling of his printers, which overrode his punctuation and even his sentence-structure and paragraphing. He sometimes overlooked plausible printing errors. More important, as a professional author living by his pen, he had to accept, with more or less good will, stringent editing by a publisher’s reader in his early days, and at all times the results of his publishers’ timidity. So the fear of Grundyish disapproval, or actual legal action, led to bowdlerisation or censorship from the very beginning of his career. Threats of libel suits produced other changes. Sometimes a publisher made more changes than he admitted to Lawrence. On a number of occasions, in dealing with American and British publishers, Lawrence produced texts for both which were not identical. Then there were extraordinary lapses like the occasion when a typist turned over two pages of MS at once, and the result happened to make sense. This whole story can be reconstructed from the introductions to the volumes in this edition and, in the case of The Poems, from the section ‘Composition, Publication, Reception’. Cumulatively this editorial material forms a history of Lawrence’s writing career.

      The Cambridge Edition aims to provide texts which are as close as can now be determined to those he would have wished to see printed. They have been established by a rigorous collation of extant manuscripts and typescripts, proofs and early printed versions; they restore the words, sentences, even whole pages omitted or falsified by editors or compositors; they are freed from printing-house conventions which were imposed on Lawrence’s style; and interference on the part of frightened publishers has been eliminated. Far from doing violence to the texts Lawrence would have wished to see published, editorial intervention is essential to recover them. Though we have to accept that some cannot now be recovered in their entirety because early states have not survived, we must be glad that so much evidence remains. Paradoxical as it may seem, the outcome of this recension will be texts which differ, often radically and certainly frequently, from those seen by the author himself.

      Editors have adopted the principle that the most authoritative form of the text is to be followed, even if this leads sometimes to a ‘spoken’ or a ‘manuscript’ rather than a ‘printed’ style. We have not wanted to strip off one house-styling in order to impose another. Editorial discretion may be allowed in order to regularise Lawrence’s sometimes wayward spelling and punctuation in accordance with his most frequent practice in a particular text. A detailed record of these and other decisions on textual matters, together with the evidence on which they are based, will be found in the Textual apparatus and notes, where variant readings in manuscripts, typescripts and proofs and printed variant forms of the text are recorded. We do not record posthumous corruptions, except where first publication was posthumous. Significant deleted MS readings will be found in the Explanatory notes and, at times, in the Textual apparatus.

      In each volume, the editorial material relates the contents to Lawrence’s life and to his other writings; it gives the history of composition of the text in some detail, for its intrinsic interest, and because this history is essential to the statement of editorial principles followed. It provides an account of publication and reception which will be found to contain a good deal of hitherto unknown information. Where appropriate, Appendices make available extended draft manuscript readings of significance, or important material, sometimes unpublished, associated with particular texts.

      Though Lawrence is a twentieth-century writer and in many respects remains our contemporary, the idiom of his day is not invariably intelligible now, especially to the many readers who are not native speakers of British English. His use of dialect is another difficulty, and further barriers to full understanding are created by now obscure literary, historical, political or other references and allusions. On these occasions Explanatory notes are supplied by the editor; it is assumed that the reader has access to a good general dictionary and that the editor need not gloss words or expressions that may be found in it. Where Lawrence’s letters are quoted in editorial matter, the reader should assume that his manuscript alone is the source of eccentricities of phrase or spelling.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Four scholars have contributed to the substance of this edition. To Carole Ferrier, I am deeply grateful for making available her variorum edition of Lawrence’s poetry up to 1919, subsequently digitalised and extended to 1928, and her two manuscript listings of Lawrence’s poetry, together with the copies and materials used to prepare her edition and listings. Her years of work ensured that my own research on manuscripts got off to a flying start; I consulted her regularly with problems I encountered; and her variorum apparatus provided structural elements retained in the critical editing apparatus of this edition. Bethan Jones shared her expertise on Lawrence’s posthumously published poetry, ‘The Nettles Notebook’ and ‘The Last Poems Notebook’, and drafted many of the Explanatory notes in this edition. Ronan McGinty substantially increased knowledge of reviews of Lawrence’s poetry published up to 1933; the ‘Reception’ sections of ‘Composition, Publication, Reception’ rely almost entirely on his research. Since 1989, John Worthen has helped solve riddles about the poems’ composition, and since 1999, he has contributed to every aspect of this edition. Without his knowledge of the Lawrence Edition and powers of organisation, contributions to the Explanatory notes and questioning of chronological detail, patience and prodding, hospitality and ratatouille, publication of this edition would have been long delayed.

      I have been fortunate in having other outstanding scholars befriend and aid me over a period of decades. For me, Keith Sagar has been a trail blazer, model and mentor, encouraging my research since the 1970s. I owe an equally long-standing debt to Ronald Draper. Since the 1980s, Mara Kalnins has been a kindred spirit, faithful correspondent and an endlessly patient and insightful supporter. Lindeth Vasey initiated me in the ways of the Lawrence Edition, kept me up-to-date with new finds and issues, and gave me advice the wisdom of which I took years to realise; our lunches on Laundress Green are among my fond memories of the last quarter-century. At times James Boulton took over the role of keeping me au fait with newly located manuscripts, and he and Lin enabled me to access letters (such as those to Charles Lahr) so that I could begin disentangling textual transmissions before all volumes of the Letters had been published. The late Warren Roberts welcomed me to Austin, informed me how the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center acquired its Lawrence collection, showed me documents in his holding and alerted me to others newly lodged with the Center, while also facilitating my contacts with other centres in the USA. Participating in conversations with the three authors of the Cambridge Biography, John Worthen, Mark Kinkead-Weekes and David Ellis, has been of immense value. Having discovered Lawrence’s source for the Fellaheen songs which he translated between 1910 and 1919, David Cram most generously shared with me his understanding of Heinrich Schäfer’s translations of the songs and pointed out other uses to which Lawrence put his interest in verse translation.

      Three private collectors who have made me welcome and shared their knowledge of the collections they held are John K. Martin, the late George Lazarus and the late W. (‘Bob’) Forster. Dealers who have shared information on manuscripts they were handling include John Wilson (of Bridge Street Old Books), Erica Fruiterman (of Baumann Rare Books) and Tom Wood (of James Jaffe Books). In the UK, those who have passed on information or granted permissions include Margaret (‘Peggy’) Needham, Barbara Weekley Barr, Ida Affleck Graves, Jonathan Long, Clive Hart, Joan A. K. Budgen, Lewis Davies, Catherine Aldington, Jean and Tony Temple, and Maggie Bird (of the London Metropolitan Police Service). Among informants in the USA, I wish to thank Brewster Ghiselin, Walton Hawk, Peter and Tracy Opheim, Marijane Osborn and Chilton V. Anderson.

      Among Lawrence researchers, I am particularly indebted to Sue Wilson and Jay Gertzman for discovering new periodical publications of Lawrence’s work; Neil Reeve for assistance with Whitman’s prose; Keith Brown for a long-sustained, long-distance dialogue; Hilary Hillier for assistance with Midlands dialect; and Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen for help with German translation, usage and geese feet. In the UK, other researchers and Lawrence Society members who have assisted me include Peter Preston, Rosemary Howard, Ron Faulks, Andrew Harrison, Clive Hart, Rhian Davies and Sean Matthews; in Italy and France, I am grateful for conversations and communications with Stefania Michelucci, Ginette Katz-Roy, Karl Orend and Kate Guyonvarch. In the USA, I have benefited from the suggestions of Keith Cushman, Bruce Clarke, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Lois More Overbeck, Dennis Jackson, Charles L. Ross, Sandra Gilbert, Jonathan Powell, Nancy Paxton and Earl Ingersoll. In Australia, I wish particularly to thank Carole Ferrier, Paul Eggert, Bruce Steele, Craig Munro, Victoria Reid and David Game for contributions to the edition, and Joseph Davis, John Ruffles, Robert Darroch, Sandra Jobson, John Lacey, and Frank and Jan Nicholas for their suggestions. I have also appreciated data supplied by Jan Pilditch in New Zealand, Bi Bingbin in China, and Takeo Iida and Masashi Asai in Japan.

      Thanks are due to the courteous and unstinting help of librarians from all the libraries and institutions listed in the ‘Manuscript locations’ section of ‘Collections and Cue-titles’, and in addition to the British Library Newspaper Reading Room, Colindale; the Cambridge University Library and the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Public Records Office at Kew, London; the Nottingham City Archives; the Main Library, the University of New South Wales; the Fisher Library, the University of Sydney; and the Auchmuty Library, University of Newcastle, NSW. In particular, I am indebted to Dorothy Johnston and the staff of the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham, including Barbara Andrews, Linda Shaw, Julie Allinson and Jayne Amat; to Research and Assistant Librarians at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, including Cathy Henderson, Ken Craven, Rich Oram, John Thomas, Barbara Smith-LaBorde, Rachel Howarth, Patricia Fox, Jake Baxter, Tara Wenger, Eric Lupfer and Elspeth Healey; to Shelley Cox at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University; to Margaret M. Sherry at Princeton University Libraries; to Carole Turley at the University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; to Polly Armstrong at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries; to Richard DePeyer, Curator of the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester; to Michael Meredith at the School Library, Eton College, Windsor; to Janet Anderson and Jennifer Broomhead, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; to Stan Larson, Marriott Library, University of Utah; to Mary Wilke, The Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, Illinois; to Sigrid Perry, Charles Deering McCormick Library, Northwestern University; to Jan Perone, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois; and to Dennis Sears, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

      Colleagues at the University of Newcastle, NSW, who have contributed to my research include John Burrows, Hugh Craig, Wayne McKenna, Tim Dolin, Imre Salusinszky, David Frost, Terry Ryan, Alistair Rolls, Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan, Dianne Osland and Kim Cheng Boey; my thanks go also to Angie Masters, Marie Hill and Nicole Cox.

      Members of the Lawrence Board at Cambridge University Press for whose help I am particularly grateful are James T. Boulton, Michael Black, Lindeth Vasey, John Worthen, Paul Poplawski and Andrew Brown. Andrew I particularly thank for his encouragement, wit and problem-solving, while other members of the Press, notably Linda Bree, Caroline Murray, Leigh Mueller, Liz Davey and Maartje Scheltens, have been prompt to answer every question.

      Funding for this long-term project has come from various sources. Cambridge University Press must be thanked for a grant enabling Carole Ferrier to extend her variorum apparatus to 1928, and the Australia Research Council for a 1989 grant which enabled me to visit important library collections and sites, from California to Florence and Bandol. Over two decades the University of Newcastle awarded Ronan McGinty and me numerous small grants for research and conference travel, data entry and computer purchase, as well as permitting me five study-leave programmes.

      Final thanks are owed to my mother, Joy Pollnitz, who taught me to love poetry, and to Lois, Aysha and Emily, who doubled as research assistants while supplying inexhaustible quotas of encouragement and the sine qua non.

      CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ

      CHRONOLOGY

      INTRODUCTION

      This edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Poems will in due course consist of three volumes. The first and second volumes make available all the collections of poetry which Lawrence assembled in his lifetime as well as the poems left in two autograph notebooks at his death. The third volume, to be published separately, will include his uncollected and unpublished poems, together with a variorum apparatus and a comprehensive manuscript listing.¹

      This edition of the Poems begins with a critically edited text of Lawrence’s Collected Poems, originally published in two volumes by Martin Secker, 1928. For Rhyming Poems, the Volume I section of Collected Poems, Lawrence combined, revised and reordered the verse from four earlier collections: Love Poems and Others (1913), Amores (1916), New Poems (1918) and Bay [1920]. In Unrhyming Poems, the Volume II section of Collected Poems, Lawrence began with the 61 poems of Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), to which he added another 4 poems, and ended with the 48 poems from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), to which he made relatively minor alterations. Because of the different typists involved in preparing the typescript of Rhyming Poems, different procedures have been followed in critically editing those poems which Lawrence typed as against those prepared by two other typists. In the case of Unrhyming Poems, the transmission histories and extant texts of Look! We Have Come Through! and Birds, Beasts and Flowers have required entirely different editing procedures for each collection. Indeed, the six collections which Lawrence reassembled in Collected Poems passed through varying textual states, autograph notebooks, autograph copy, typescript copy and proofs, sometimes heavily revised and sometimes uncorrected, before reaching sometimes markedly variant published states. It has been necessary to develop slightly or markedly different editing strategies for each of the six collections brought together in Collected Poems. The transmission histories are analysed in the ‘Composition, Publication, Reception’ section in Volume II, and the editing procedures are set out in the Textual note for each collection.

      Between the two sections Rhyming Poems and Unrhyming Poems has been inserted ‘All of Us’. Lawrence typed copy for ‘All of Us’ in 1916, and until 1919 he tried without success to find a publisher for the sequence.² The full collection, which has never previously been published, represents Lawrence’s response to the First World War in surprising forms and shows that he had previously unrecognised knowledge of its far-flung campaigns. Formally and thematically, ‘All of Us’ resembles the oblique war poems which Lawrence had originally written for New Poems and Bay in 1918, and which in 1928 he grouped at the end of Rhyming Poems. Chronologically, although ‘All of Us’ postdates composition of the opening poems in Look! We Have Come Through! (most of which Lawrence had written in 1912 or 1913) by some four years, the ‘All of Us’ sequence was completed less than a month before he began to revise Look! We Have Come Through! for publication. In fact, his preparation of ‘All of Us’ overlaps with his composition of the poems that conclude Look! We Have Come Through!, from ‘She Said as Well to Me’ to ‘Craving for Spring’. Placement of ‘All of Us’ between Rhyming Poems and Unrhyming Poems provides the best available indication of the development of Lawrence’s poetry in the 1910s.

      After Unrhyming Poems, the edition continues with Pansies, a collection which Lawrence began writing in November 1928 and completed in February 1929. During the last fifteen months of his life, Lawrence expended much time and energy circumventing threats of state and publisher censorship in order to see the three editions of these verse pensées through the press. The last three collections of poetry derive, either at two removes or directly, from two notebooks of autograph poems which Lawrence had yet to revise fully at the time of his death. From the first of these two notebooks, here named ‘The Nettles Notebook’, Lawrence extracted a short book of poems, Nettles (1930), which he did not live to see in print but for which he was able to correct proofs. Versions of the bulk of the poems remaining in ‘The Nettles Notebook’ and of all the poems in ‘The Last Poems Notebook’ first appeared in the two sections of Last Poems (1932), where they were entitled ‘More Pansies’ and ‘Last Poems’. In the verse that he entered in each of the two notebooks Lawrence developed distinct themes, tones and styles. The distinctiveness of the notebooks permits each to be conceived of and edited as a draft collection of poetry, with particular provisions made to reproduce drafts and redrafts.³ As is the case for Collected Poems, the transmission histories of Pansies, Nettles, ‘The Nettles Notebook’ and ‘The Last Poems Notebook’ are detailed in ‘Composition, Publication and Reception’, and the editing strategies for each collection are summarised in the Textual notes for the four collections.

      Following the poetry, eight Appendices present the various prose prefaces and forewords which Lawrence wrote for collections of his poems. The section entitled ‘Composition, Publication, Reception’ then provides a full narrative account of Lawrence’s poetry and related prose, and of responses to it, up until 1932 and 1933, the years in which the Florence, New York and London editions of Last Poems appeared and were reviewed. The section which follows provides Textual notes detailing the procedures adopted in editing each of the collections, a Textual apparatus of variants in the texts used to edit the collections, and Explanatory notes for the poems and prefatory prose. The first two volumes of the edition end with an index of first lines and titles (including variant titles).

      When it is finished, this edition of Lawrence’s poetry will complete the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, which issued its first two volumes, Volume I of The Letters and Apocalypse from the Works, in 1979. The Cambridge Edition has published in total eight volumes of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence as well as a Selected Letters. When complete, the Works will number thirty-nine volumes, including Lawrence’s twelve novels, four volumes of early versions of novels, eight volumes of short fiction, three volumes of poetry, one volume of plays, three volumes of essays, four travel books with other travel essays, and four volumes of non-fiction prose. In such ways, the Cambridge Edition celebrates not only the extraordinary range of Lawrence’s work but also one of the great achievements of twentieth-century writing in English.

      COLLECTIONS AND CUE-TITLES

      A Poetry collections by D. H. Lawrence

      (The place of publication, here and throughout, is London unless otherwise stated.)

      B Cue-titles of other works by D. H. Lawrence

      C Cue-titles of works by others

      D Abbreviations of names

      E Manuscript locations

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