SOURCE: Lockwood, M. J. “Early Poetry.” In A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Thinking in Poetry, pp. 11-34. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Lockwood focuses attention on the poems written between 1905 and 1908 by D. H. Lawrence.

I 1905-1908

Lawrence wrote his first poems, the two companion-pieces called “Campions” and “Guelder Roses” (854-5), in the spring of 1905, when he was nineteen and a student teacher. The two poems are Lawrence's earliest surviving literary work, written almost a year before he began his first novel, The White Peacock, as ‘Laetitia’, and two years before the earliest short story or play. He had told Jessie Chambers, when he decided to begin writing, that ‘it will be poetry’, suggesting that he had considered, and for the time being rejected, other literary forms.¹

Twenty-three years later, in the Foreword intended for a collected edition...