The Phoenix Paradox

Book excerpt: This book traces D. H. Lawrence's devel­opment as a poet from his earliest to his latest poems. Focusing on the revision of poems in the Collected Poems, 1928, Mandell uncovers the implicit auto­biographical narrative that underlies the collection and that dictates its structure. Lawrence rearranged and rewrote the poems to conform to a chronologic, thematic, and mythic plan, a plan he hints at in the unpublished Foreword to Collected Poems. In its final form, the poetry tells the story of Lawrence's "demon," a figure of his essential self, by recounting the chronological development of the "new" from the "old" self. Comparing form and content of ver­sions of representative poems from the collection, Mandell analyzes the evalu­ation not only of Lawrence's poetic style but also of his ideas concerning human and physical nature. She contends that Lawrence was a mature poet with a de­veloped system of poetic and philosophi­cal thought by 1917, when he published Look! We Have Come Through! At that time he rewrote extensively. Through comparison of selected poems, several of which appear in print for the first time, we can reproduce Lawrence's emen­dations and thus depict the creative mind at work.