Bethan Jones: The Last Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Shaping a Late Style

• Ginette Roy

This is the first book-length and in-depth study of a group of poems written by Lawrence in 1929 in two manuscript notebooks that Richard Aldington published posthumously under the title Last Poems in 1932. This collection included the short satirical poems Lawrence called “Nettles” and a series of mythopeic works like the famous “Bavarian Gentians” and “The Ship of Death”. Bethan Jones’ fruitful approach is mostly intertextual and internally contextual. As suggested in the subtitle of her book, she focuses on the specificity of Lawrence’s late poetic style, which leads her to consider his late style in general, whether in verse or prose, and to analyse very meticulously the interrelatedness between the poems and the prose works he wrote between 1927 and 1930 and sometimes much earlier. When writing the poems of the second booknote, Lawrence often returned to the first to borrow images and themes. Bethan Jones starts from these often unfinished late poems and their various drafts and broadens the scope of her study to show the baffling complexity of the writer’s composition process.