D.H. Lawrence’s uncensored poems

D.H. Lawrence’s uncensored poems published for the first time

 

When the ban on D.H. Lawrence’s controversial novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was finally lifted in 1960 it was a watershed moment for censorship in Britain. But many assume it was only Lawrence’s novels that suffered at the hands of the censors.

Now, nearly 100 years after Lawrence wrote them, a collection of his poems have been published for the first time in their original uncensored form by the Press.

The two volume edition – the first ever critical edition of Lawrence’s poetry and the final part of the Press’s 40-volume series of Lawrence’s Letters and Works – restores deleted passages and lines removed by publishers fearing government intervention because of Lawrence’s anti-war stance and his attacks on British imperialism.

Some 860 poems are published in the new edition. They include, All of Us, a sequence of 31 war poems never before published in full and many others unpublished in Lawrence’s lifetime. One poem, Rose Look Out Upon Me, is previously unpublished in any form and was discovered by the volume’s editor Christopher Pollnitz in a typescript formerly held in the private collection of George Lazarus, now located at the University of Nottingham.

Pollnitz said “Few of Lawrence’s poetry collections escaped censorship.  Faber & Faber omitted three poems because two referred to the Victorian statesman, W. E. Gladstone, one to the former Home Secretary of the Tory government, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. And Lawrence’s most important collection of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, suffered extensive censorship at the hands of his American publisher. The new Cambridge volume returns to the original manuscripts and typescripts and what emerges radically shifts our understanding of Lawrence as a poet.”

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence: The Poems, edited by Christopher Pollnitz is published by Cambridge University Press, price £130.00

Related site:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/24/dh-lawrence-war-poetry-censorship