Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Shearsman Classics) - Softcover

Lawrence, D. H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848611579 ISBN 13: 9781848611573

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2011

Synopsis

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) was the volume that Lawrence himself described as his best collection of poetry. Composed in various locations during his exile-in Italy, France, Germany and the United States-this long collection occupies a crucial place in the development of his poetry and is that most unusual of creations: a masterpiece of modernist nature writing. This version offers the full text of the first British edition (which included the poems from the short 'Tortoises' volume, unlike the US edition).

About this title

Review:

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.

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 intensity of his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can.

"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."

About the Author:

D.H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottingham in 1895, to a father who was a miner and a mother who was a home-based lace-worker. After beginnings as a teacher, Lawrence's work was taken up by Ford Madox Ford and others, and he made a significant mark as a novelist and as a writer of short stories. Often steeped in controversy because of his frank treatment of sexuality, but also because of his elopement with another man's wife-a German national-just before World War 1, Lawrence eventually was to spend many years in voluntary exile in continental Europe, and then in Mexico and the U.S.A. Famous in the wider world for novels such as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and the scandal-struck Lady Chatterley's Lover, he wrote over 800 poems, and several collections of short stories and volumes of essays. He was also an accomplished painter. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence, in the south of France, in 1930.

About this edition

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1848611579
• ISBN 13: 9781848611573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 178