SOURCE: An introduction to D. H. Lawrence: Selected Poems, New Directions, 1947, pp. 1-23.

In the following introduction to Lawrence's Selected Poems, Rexroth believes that, rather than being a major poet like Thomas Hardy, Lawrence was a minor prophet like William Blake and William Butler Yeats.

At the very beginning Lawrence belonged to a different order of being from the literary writers of his day. In 1912 he said: "I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in turn loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is...