The Romantic Context of Modern Poetry
It is a simple step from Orientalism’s miscalculation of ethnicity to Romanticism’s customary assumptions about nature. They are, as M.H. Abrams reminds us, one and the same. Both regard their subject matter as transcendental. Modern poetry’s wish to dethrone its Romantic precursors makes the influence more difficult to shed and makes it repeat Romantic assumptions with an unlikely tenacity. Neither subaltern populations nor landscape are exotic wonders. Like diversity, nature, too, is a complex of discursive systems. Environmentalism’s belief that nature is sacred misses the point it presumes to make. Nature does not lie beyond culture; culture lies within nature. The meaning of “culture,” as Terry Eagleton reminds us (2000), is husbandry—the dialogue between the human species and the natural world. Their relationship is not one of subject and object but of continuity.
Modern verse is characterized by one very particular habit of Romantic mind that it cannot dispel: the habit, from Wordsworth and Keats to Swinburne and Hardy, of employing landscape and objects as projections of the poet’s state of mind. D.H. Lawrence’s poems are revolutionary because they present what Sandra Gilbert calls “an alternative modernism” that disrupts Romantic and modernist practice alike (2001, 238). They constitute an epistemological break not only from Romanticism but also the flight from it of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. They do not repeat either one but go beyond them both. What emerges instead is something distinct: an environmental relation to nature—I will be specific about this—rather than a use of nature as a screen for imaginative projection or a presumable rejection of the natural world in favor of timeless poetic “monuments,” to use Yeats’s phrase, “of unageing intellect” (1928, 8). For Lawrence, by contrast, the poem is an environment and the environment is a poem. To see Lawrence’s “complex position within modernism,” as Holly Laird puts it (2015, 40:3), requires a brief description of Lawrence’s Romantic context before taking up Eliot, Pound, and H.D. as foils to Lawrence himself.
Keats’s first Hyperion fragment is a template for Romantic procedure. The landscape is a measure of the poet’s imaginative crisis:
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. (1818–1819/1820, 7)
This is the world behind the world of the poem, its hidden, and toxic, garden, the place of growth that has lost its generative powers. Here the “leaf”—the fact and the instrument of growth and dissemination—is “dead.” “Not one light seed” can travel through the air because the air does not “stir.” Even Wordsworth falls into a Keatsian idiom when his focus is on a microscopic nature, although, because it is Wordsworth, the metaphors are confident rather than depressed:
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:
Much favored in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which erelong
We were transplanted—there were we let loose
For sports of wider range.
(1850, 1:301–6)
The seeds are “let loose,” free to disseminate. They are not “dead,” as they are in the constrained and defeated Keats. The tropology, however, links them in a common predisposition to regard nature as a screen for the imagination, a habit of mind that persists as the nineteenth century unfolds.
Its specificity is disarmingly precise. In Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), the stance is Keatsian, even if the setting is Wordsworthian. Indeed, the relation between the two is the poem’s very subject. The sonorous conclusion to the poem converts possibility into defeat through a slow transformation from Wordsworthian to Keatsian topography. The dramatization of failure is played out in the poem’s splendid technique. A consummate poetic control takes its own loss of control over its subject matter as its theme:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep … .
And all dead years draw thither
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs … .
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
(1866, 13–16, 67–70, 89–96)
Hardy’s likeness to Swinburne is well-known. Note how exact the likeness is in both tropology and thematic concern in an early poem like “Neutral Tones” (1867), written only a year after “The Garden of Proserpine”:
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
(1867, 1–4)
Like Swinburne’s “blown buds,” Hardy’s seeds will not even have a chance to grow in this landscape; it is too cold to allow anything to grow. Like Swinburne’s “wild” and “wintry leaves,” Hardy’s “leaves” are without life. They are “starving.” Like Keats’s “dead leaf,” they have no nourishment in this cold climate that offers the poet little more than a reflection of his imaginative despair. Nor is the frosty “pond” simply a mirror of the poet’s imaginative poverty. “Neutral Tones” is also a poem about a personal relationship that is as dead as the scene that surrounds it. No happy issue is likely in this dual landscape of loss.
Eliot, Pound, H.D.
This same rhetorical environment is still in place in High Modernism. There is no more baleful landscape of the interior than that of The Waste Land (1922). To find it throughout the poem is not surprising. Eliot’s “broken” “tent” (1922, 173) is the poet’s own imagination in pieces, an apostrophe rather than a reflection of the toxic effects of real life. The imagery of the poem’s opening lines is familiar.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(1922, 1–4)
The “land” is, as it is in Hardy and Swinburne, “dead”; the “stirring” of “roots”—we already know this, too—is impossible. For Eliot, as for all our poets, this presumable crisis in communication is actually an opportunity to have a new subject to write about: the image of nature as a cipher for failure and loss. Eliot’s “objective correlative” (1919a, 145) is Ruskin’s “Pathetic fallacy” (1856, 3: 148) in modern dress.
Pound, by contrast, effectively departs from Romantic practice by focusing instead on what Douglas Mao calls “solid objects” (1998) that stand apart from the poet as material wholes reflecting neither the self nor nature. The result, however, is the same—Pound’s objects, like Keats’s urn or Yeats’s Byzantium, are also projections of a poetic ideal. A short lyric such as “Medallion,” the concluding poem of the Mauberley sequence (1920), imitates in its concrete language and austere design the autonomous object it represents and to whose simulation it aspires. When the “solid object” is drawn from nature, however, the Romantic illusion is undone like a trick of magic. It is the real project of “In A Station of the Metro” (1913):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough. (1–2)
Here the natural image of “petals on a wet, black bough” is called in to elucidate the urban, photographic image of the “faces in the crowd” with which the poem begins. The result is the laying of one snapshot upon another, much as the “petals” lie upon the “black bough.” The natural metaphor doesn’t elucidate the urban one so much as it redoubles its intentional structure as a metaphor. Rather than make the “faces” more vivid, it makes the “petals” in the metaphor more vivid than what they represent. The metaphor’s sequence is the representation of its first representation. For all Pound’s efforts—he brooded over the poem’s composition for almost a year—the result is a Romantic one: The natural image succeeds in redeeming the dreary city by refreshing it through its use as art. The “solid object” is undone by the method of its construction.
Nature remains a dominion for use even when the poet is H.D. Hieratic and imperious, she, too, finds in nature the sermons that she puts there. The speaker of “Oread” (1914) invokes the turbulence of the sea as a source of power. Although the personae is a classical nymph of the ocean, the speaker is really the poet seeking inspiration for her song. Being overwhelmed by the waves is afflatus, not dejection. It prompts the speaker to assign to the sea attributes from another order of nature, those of the “great pines” whose “green” may match that of the sea in color but whose qualities are different from it as phenomena. The poet has come back to life, thanks to the Romanticism he presumably abjures. The “pools of fir” that the sea becomes in the conceit with which the poem concludes are a metaphor for a metaphor twice removed from a scene that was never anything but a prop for making a poetic object. As it does for Pound, nature remains a source for the poet’s image of a poem.
Even if one is to grant to Pound’s Imagism the lack of interest in nature for which it is customarily celebrated, a more familiar problem remains. The cost of Imagism’s revolution requires it to distinguish sharply between form and vision, even if vision is secured, as it is in H.D., as a heightened function of form. This is, to be sure, the Romantic distinction between nature and speaker in a different register, but it is also the distinction between the ideal and the concrete that Saussure deconstructs at the same moment in historical time that sees the Imagist experiment in poetry. When Language Poetry invokes Imagism as a literary source, it is justifiable. When it links it to the Saussurean tradition, notably Derrida, it is not. This is, as I noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, the customary misreading of structuralism and deconstruction. Like Saussure, Derrida is no formalist, even if one uplifts him as a prior authority rather than regards him, as New Historicism does, as a foe. Nor is New Formalism’s distinction between confessional and formal poetry more reasonable. Confessional verse often opens new formal vistas as a direct function of its visionary impulses, an inevitability that becomes clear with the arrival of hip hop. Modernism’s more supple revolution in verse comes with the poems of D.H. Lawrence.
D.H. Lawrence’s Revolution in Verse
Speaker and scene have a wholly different relationship in Lawrence’s poems than they do in those of Eliot, Pound, or H.D. What is Lawrence’s own revolution in verse? Lawrence reorganizes the customary relationship between speaker and scene by reanimating nature and personages in a fresh way. The Romantic practice of using nature as a projection of self is rejected in favor of reexamining the speaker’s relation to landscape. In “The Evening Land,” a poem included in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the project is explicit:
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings? (80–82)
Interrogating its surroundings, the self is a sequence of Paterian moments in constant dialogue with what lies outside it. Each dissolves into the other. The result is to loosen the distinction between speaker and scene, subject and object, undoing their categorical opposition by apprehending both in the sequence of time (Laird, 1988). “For Lawrence,” writes Marjorie Perloff, “there is no longer a distinction between subject and object, consciousness and the external world. Rather, the new space is one in which the mind and its objects are present in a single realm of proximity” (Perloff, 1985, 126–27).
This transformation gives new life, not to the speaker—not at first, anyway—but to the environment that surrounds it. This shift in the relation between speaker and scene defines Lawrence’s poems and is their guiding principle. No victim of the fallacy of “expressive form,” as R.P. Blackmur calls it (1935), Lawrence places the speaker in a relation of active exchange with the environment. Above all, it grants the speaker agency. In the process—and in order to do so—poetic language is also reimagined. Its “metaphoricity,” as Fiona Becket puts it, is “radical” (1997, 46). By positing nature and its objects, including human ones, as radically external to the speaker, it prompts speaker and scene to interact.
The shift is doubly surprising. Lawrence’s real tradition as a poet is neither Eliot’s apostrophic late Romanticism nor Pound’s empiricist modernism. It is pastoral in the strict sense (Empson, 1935; Williams, 1973a). Pastoral is best suited to Lawrence as a poet working to free himself from Romantic precedent. Pastoral is a contradictory literary condition that simultaneously idealizes nature and regards it as a site of working interaction between species and environment. Virgil splits the tension between the two in Theocritus’s Idylls by presenting an Arcadian landscape in the Eclogues and a landscape of labor in the Georgics. In neither case is nature the occasion for Romantic apostrophe—for the expression of imagination through landscape—but for the conversion of idealization to transaction. Lawrence exploits pastoral’s “double function,” as Terry Gifford calls it (1999, 52), by transforming the Arcadian idealization of nature into what Lawrence Buell calls an “ecocentric repossession of pastoral” (1995, 52).
It is the poet, however, not the farmer, who does the work. Its effects change the environment it seems only to mirror or represent. Lawrence’s language is ecological, not solipsistic. It not only places the poet in the landscape—any subjective utterance does that. Its subjectivity creates, not foils for itself, but predicates that it interrogates and that pass from possibility to recognition, from sowing to harvest. Lawrence’s poetic labor gains agency for both self and other by shaking loose the lineaments of assumption about a scene and its objects the way a farmer—a husband, etymologically a tiller of the soil—shakes a harvest basket to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Husbandry, the working interaction of species and environment, the original meaning of the notion of “culture,” long precedes the ideological distinction between culture and nature that is, like industrial civilization, a product of the nineteenth century. Husbandry is the active work of pastoral as an environmental rather than a Romantic mode. It well expresses the capaciousness of Lawrence’s poetic project by yoking, etymologically, the relation of speaker and its objects in amorous as well as agricultural terms. It yokes the environmental preoccupations of Lawrence’s landscape poems to the erotic preoccupations of both Lawrence’s love poems and his fiction. Neither phallic nor gynocentric, Lawrentian “husbandry” is gender-smashing, “pansexual” in human terms and, mutatis mutandis, also faithful to Pan, the god of agriculture. Lawrence’s environmentalism is holistic. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, roots and stems are continuous; neither is more privileged than the other (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980).
Lawrentian husbandry finds its poetic analogue and source in Whitman. Lawrence’s long-acknowledged debt to his American precursor measures his difference, like Whitman’s own, from High Romanticism. The difference lies in the new relationship between speaker and scene that separates Whitman from Wordsworth, particularly the different status accorded nature despite the continuities in self-absorption and in the interest in common things that they share. For Whitman, nature is genuinely other, not because of a lamentable alienation of self from world, but because of an intentional poetic strategy that regards both natural and domestic things as nurturing and objective rather than as projections of states of mind. Whether it is “the daily housework” in “To Think of Time” (1891–92, VI:66) or “a spear of summer grass” in “Song of Myself” (1891–92, 1:5), what stands apart from the self is what aids in its survival and provides it with delight. Indeed, the link between erotic and agricultural husbandry is entirely explicit:
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat,
it shall be you!
Sun so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall
be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub
against me it shall be you!
Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak,
loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!
Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d,
mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.
(1891–92, 24:537–43)
Lawrence’s poems repay close attention by revealing their common intent as discursive husbandry whether they are long or short, familiar or obscure, brutal or soft-spoken. They are revisions of the situations with which they begin, whether it is the revision of the speaker’s stance toward its objects, its assumptions about them, or its use of figuration to restructure its relationship to them. Let us take up each kind in turn, beginning with a canonical poem, “Snake,” and concluding with a very brief and presumably marginal one, “Green.”
These poems come from different moments in Lawrence’s career—”Snake” from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), “Green” from Look! We Have Come Through (1917)—but they share a stance despite the time of their publication, and they share a style. Keith Sagar has argued that Birds, Beasts and Flowers marks a shift in Lawrence’s verse defined by “a healthy purging of his hitherto … anthropomorphic relation to nature” and its replacement by a concern with “systems, interactions, and interdependencies”—with “what,” says Sagar, “we have come to call ecology” (2001, 14, 152.) This is true, to be sure, not only of “Snake,” but of other poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers such as “Almond Blossom” and “Cypresses.” Sagar, however, overstates the case. Lawrence’s concern with ecology rather than anthropomorphism is actually present in his verse from the start. Lawrence’s reassessment of the relation between speaker and scene is not a function of his development but part of a strategy that attends his poems as a whole. Indeed, the early “Green” is an even more radical reassessment of the relation between speaker and scene than those at work in the later “Snake” and “Almond Blossom.” Its syntactical specificity in elaborating this reassessment is extraordinary, and shows the constancy of Lawrence’s poetic design.
“Snake” dismantles Romantic allegory before redefining it. The speaker’s sun-bleached encounter with the snake outside his house (“hus” or “house” is the first syllable of “husband”) is by turns tender, stark, and matter-of-fact. It requires little in the way of close or figural reading because of its almost novelistic directness, narrating the speaker’s shifting emotions as he and the snake exchange looks and measure one another, less to assess a course of action than to assess each other’s potential meaning for the other.
Here allegory intervenes, not on the part of the poet but on the part of the reader. This is the real text of the poem, from which the reader is visibly absent. But the reader, of course, is, invisibly, everywhere, trying to make the poem tell a story that it does not tell. “Consciousness,” says Gifford, “is transformed into conscience” as the poet subdues his sense of the snake as evil, and, as this allegorical reading of the poem concludes, “awe is transformed into humility” (1999, 163). The dangers of reading “Snake” in this way, however, are what the poem enacts. Like Milton’s language of temptation in his descriptions of the Garden of Eden, assessing sense in “Snake” tests the reader, not the poet. Eve’s “ringlets” are “wanton” in a pre-fallen state (1674, 4: 306), not for our original parents, who are innocent, but for the postlapsarian reader, who, as Stanley Fish has pointed out (1967), is not. Similarly, the speaker in Lawrence’s poem is innocent. This is an open-ended encounter by a water-trough, although Lawrence’s reader is led, inevitably, into looking for significance where there is none beyond what is stated. Lawrence’s literalism is actually a high form of figuration. To recant a symbolic fall or slothfulness is the reader’s first duty. To do so is also to enact what the poem itself enacts—a shift from allegory in the traditional sense to one in the modern sense. Not a key that unlocks a door, the signifier “snake” is a key that unlocks every door, a process of reading whereby the reader forsakes reading by fixed codes in favor of reading signs as metalanguage. Allegory here, as it is for Angus Fletcher (1964) or Paul de Man (1979), means reading the signifier, not for what it means—not, that is, as a sign—but for what it may be said to mean—as a signifier. Lawrence shakes off the sign much as he does the water with which he bathes himself in the sun. What is separated from the sign or husk is the seed which is its real bounty.
In “Cypresses,” Lawrence denies allegory while simultaneously resurrecting it. It is the reverse of the avuncular undoing of the snake’s allegorical trappings. Because the speaker denies that “a great secret” (6) is to be found among the cypresses, it grants them a new kind of meaning by virtue of its denial. Is there “a great secret” (6) to the Tuscan cypresses? They are “monumental” (10), but they have “shed their sound and finished all their echoing” (26). The natural image is a “monument” because it is not. The idealization allows Lawrence—quite unlike Keats and his nightingale or Hardy and his thrush—to plunge back into the environment rather than to stand apart from it:
They say the fit survive;
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again. (72–75)
What is “monumental” is survival—the survival of the species, thanks to death, not despite it. Death is the principle of life, not its antithesis. It is the precondition of life in all its mutability. The poem, like the Etruscan cypresses, is an environment with which the speaker interacts, not a tableau of his imagination or a symbol for his conquest of time.
In a poem such as “Almond Blossom,” Lawrence refashions allegory by collapsing the difference between nature and culture with which the poem begins. Its end is in its beginning. Tenor and vehicle are inappropriate categories with which to assess metaphors which are not, as it turns out, metaphors. Nor are their components distinct classes of external phenomena:
Even iron can put forth,
Even iron. (1–2)
Far from hypostatizing the traditional battle between nature and culture for which Lawrence is customarily celebrated, the poem calls into question the stability of the opposition by subjecting “iron” to the same natural process of decay as that which assails the almond tree. The common force that binds them is what, in Pater’s words, “rusts iron and ripens corn” (1873, 234). Indeed, “iron” is also a natural element. It is listed on the table of elements. But, like the serpent, culture has enlisted it to signify its dominance over nature in the manufacturing age to which Nottingham, and Lawrence’s lungs, are witness and victim.
The poem makes no bones about this double movement, granting to “iron” both its natural status and the cultural one for which it has become a second-order signifier—a “myth” in Roland Barthes’s sense (1957):
This is the iron age,
But let us take heart
Seeing iron break and bug,
Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.
The almond tree,
December’s bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.
The almond tree,
That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake
In supreme bitterness. (3–11)
Referring to his own work, Lawrence even likens the mythology of “iron” to that of the “snake.” “Like a snake,” iron has been socialized, as it were. The proof is its “supreme bitterness.” Iron’s literalness, exemplified by its variety of uses in the material world—“bare iron hooks”—is evacuated by the chain of transformations by means of which it is denaturalized as the line concludes—“sticking out of the earth.” Its literalness is vouchsafed by its subsequent figural destiny, which is, ironically, another kind of literalness, this one stemming, as it were, once more from its organic status. In a companion poem, “Bare Almond Trees,” the trees’ branches are also material—“like iron implements, twisted hideous”—but are once again, in the same figuration, “sticking out of the earth” as the line concludes (8).
No wonder “trees suffer,” as Lawrence puts it later in “Almond Blossom” (25). They are “like races” (25). The comparison is discomfiting but logically consistent in the constant figural exchange. “Iron,” “trees,” “races”—categorically distinct, presumably, but neither epistemologically distinct in their behavior as signifiers, nor politically distinct in their behavior as elements in history. Iron and trees alike are “like drawn blades” that are “never sheathed” (27). Like “races” in history, they cross boundaries. They are “alien trees in alien lands” (28). They are characterized by their “prolixity” (35). Because, like “iron,” “trees” can mean many things, the myths of history and its ideas can subdue them into meaning only one thing. Meaning, to use Saussure’s words, “follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based on tradition, it is arbitrary” (1916, 74). Even “the Cross”(48) is a tree whose elemental status and its mythical one are at odds in the dual glory to which it pretends. It “steps out” of its own “sacred forthcoming” (56) as a religious sign or symbol to become “a naked tree of blossom” (57)—a migrant sème or floating signifier. The tree reveals itself to be a tree, not a Cross, naked and true not because of its symbolic glory but despite it. Its simplicity is inseparable from its symbolism since its sacredness is, by definition, a transcendence of its simplicity.
“Green They Shone”
A brief and seemingly marginal poem such as “Green” allows Lawrence to engage in the kind of renewed agency for the poetic speaker that this heightened practice can produce in even the most miniature form. “Green” requires an allegorical reading more than “Snake” because it offers no first-order allegorizations. Like “Almond Blossom,” its focus is, despite its human result, on its materials. They are not even phenomena. The title of the poem designates its real actor (or, more precisely, its chief actant), the signifier “green.” Note the career of the signifier as the poem unfolds. Here is the text in full:
The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen. (1–6)
First, “green” is a predicate. It is what the subject “dawn” is (1). Then, it is an object—“the sky was green wine” (2). The color is assigned, not to the sky, as it is to dawn, but to the metaphor for the sky, “wine.” It is, in other words, now positioned wholly apart from the subject, as something that measures it, but measures it as something different and distinct from it at the very moment its intent is to heighten its specificity. Finally, “green” is, by virtue of the Latinate inversion which makes the color of the beloved’s eyes precede and even usurp the place of the eyes themselves, a subject in its own right—“green/They shone.”
The poem as a whole is a reverse declension of the same signifier from object (“green” as a third position in relation to a subject, grammatically another person or thing) to subject—“green” becomes agent: “green/They shone.” The inversion or transplant from another language’s structure into English accomplishes a change in the architecture of the English expression itself, expanding its expressiveness by an act of rhetorical husbandry. Husbandry, by definition, is an activity that is both natural and cultural or, to put it more exactly, that is really neither one. It is both. When noun and adjective—“green” and “green”—trade places, substance and characteristic also do so. When they are aided in doing so, thanks to the fortuitous nature of rhyme—a pure coincidence of sound that appears to mirror sense without epistemological justification—the status of the identity of noun and characteristic as contingent is secured and erased at one and the same time.
This paradox or deconstructive turn is precisely Lawrence’s point and advances his environmental agenda. The fluctuation in language and the fluctuation among its objects are also one and the same. The transposition of what is presumably external to speech is accomplished by a rhetorical transposition within speech. By virtue of his figural virtuosity, Lawrence resituates the object into a subject. Language effects a phenomenological change in the environment. It is the labor by which the poet actively engages the environment to produce a transformation in both the environment and himself.
The inversion of “green” and “green” encapsulates wider and wider aspects of Lawrence’s art and even his life. As an act of figural husbandry, Lawrence’s art also transplants the Latinate—“the warm South,” in Keats’s phrase (1819, 15)—into his poetic diction, much as Lawrence transplanted himself into warmer and warmer climes, from the Mediterranean to New Mexico, to accommodate his illness. The same aim attends both his writing and his body: making the subject “green” or healthy, repositioning it from being an object or victim into being an active and living principle that redeems its own fate at the hands of time.
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10. Empson, William. 1935. Some Versions of Pastoral. Rpt. New York: New Directions, 1974.
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14. Gifford, Terry.The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 235-52.
15. Hardy, Thomas. 1867. “Neutral Tones.” Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1968.
16. H[ilda] D[oolitle]. 1914. “Oread.” In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1988.
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24. Pater, Walter. 1873. “Conclusion.” In The Renaissance. New Library Edition. London: Macmillan, 1910.
25. Perloff, Marjorie. 1985. “Lawrence’s Lyric Theater: Birds, Beasts and Flowers.” D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Philip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 108-29.
26. Pound, Ezra. 1913. “In A Station of the Metro.” In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1957.
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29. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Eds. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
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31. Whitman, Walt. 1891-2. “To Think of Time.” In Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michel Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.
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“‘Green They Shone:’: The Poem As Environment.” The D.H. Lawrence Review 43, no. 1/2 (2018): 66–80.
