With an Introduction and
Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury
Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements
in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This
edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected
Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding
to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was
still writing poetry when he died in 1930. It therefore allows the
reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate
the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement.
Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more
than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest
English writers of the twentieth century.