Birds, Beasts and Flowers

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) made a contribution to poetry that, in the words of Lousie Bogan, "can now be recognized as one of the most important, in any language, of our time." Birds, Beasts, and Flowers!, his first great experiment in free verse, was published when he was thirty-eight. This Black Sparrow edition re-sets the text in the format of the first edition (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) and restores several "indecent" lines suppressed by the original publisher. Lawrence's original jacket artwork is reproduced on the jacket in full color.

Many of these individual poems are popular in anthologies - they are best read, however, in the context and continuum of the whole book. In preparing the original collection for publication, Lawrence grouped the poems in a purposeful sequence and prefaced many of the subsections with brief quotations from the third edition of John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, which particularly interested him at the time.

He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society. -- Academy of American Poets

Birds, Beasts and Flowers is the peak of Lawrence's achievement as a poet...Like the romantics [his] starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animal or flower, but, unlike the romantics, he never confuses the feelings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them. The lucidity of his language matches the intensityof his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can. -- W.H. Auden