D H Lawrence - Dirty War Poems Published

10,000 words were censored from Sons and Lovers, copies of The Rainbow were destroyed (a lesbian episode among the offending passages) and the sexually explicit Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned. But it was not just the novels of D H Lawrence that suffered censorship. The state, and fearful publishers, also banned his poetry.

A new edition of poems by Lawrence, entitled The Poems, sheds new light on the miner's son, revealing him as a brilliant war poet. The work, attacking British imperialism during the First World War, was rendered unreadable by the censor's pen and barred from publication. Deleted passages have now been restored and many errors removed for this first critical edition of Lawrence's poetry.  

The new volume's editor, Christopher Pollnitz, told the Observer that it “radically shifts our understanding of Lawrence's significance as a poet.”

 

Lawrence wrote poetry from 1905 until his death in 1930 and over 800 poems have been published in this new edition. They include All of Us, a sequence of 31 war poems never fully published before, which reveal Lawrence's preoccupation with the Allies' campaigns in the war. Between 1916 and 1919, Lawrence struggled to get the sequence into print. Pollnitz said, “Publishers who knew of the banning of The Rainbow would not touch a collection that criticised imperial policy – the opening up of eastern fronts in Turkey or Iraq – and poetry that explored the evil of self-sacrifice for some abstract greater good.”

Lawrence also wrote about the home front and the changing roles of women – a girl startling her boyfriend by asking him to stay with her before he leaves – and how childhood innocence can be wrecked by the stresses of war.

Ill-health meant Lawrence himself was never conscripted. His insight into the war probably came from his pacifist friend, Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. While war poets such as Wilfred Owen depicted the cruelty of a bloody battlefield, Lawrence tackled the loss of lives and impact on loved ones from a political point of view. He also had to write with more subtlety because censors were already watching him.

The new Cambridge Edition is now available.