D.H. Lawrence
Quick answer: How D.H. Lawrence wrote poems: free verse built on breath, animal encounters and living repetition. A craft guide with reading list and practice tips.
Most readers meet D.H. Lawrence as a novelist first, the author of Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. But the Nottinghamshire miner's son also left behind hundreds of pages of poems, and the best of them changed what English free verse could do. Born in 1885 and dead of tuberculosis by 1930, he wrote fast, travelled constantly, and treated poetry as a way of catching life while it was still moving.
Lawrence matters to working poets because he offers a complete alternative to the polished, finished lyric. His poems think out loud, repeat themselves like waves, and stare at animals and flowers until something true and uncomfortable surfaces. If your free verse feels shapeless, he shows you where its real shape comes from: attention and breath.
A novelist who trusted the moment
Lawrence began with rhymed autobiographical lyrics, including the much-anthologised 'Piano' (1918), in which a grown man is undone by the memory of childhood evenings of song. Reading Walt Whitman loosened him. In an essay usually known as 'Poetry of the Present' (1920) he argued for a verse of the immediate instant, unfinished by design, as against the gem-like perfection of the traditional lyric.
The theory bore fruit in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), written across Italy, Ceylon, Australia and New Mexico. These are the poems on which his reputation stands: long, loose, alert, and unlike anything else in English at the time.
The signature moves
Four techniques recur wherever Lawrence is at his best.
Turning his moves into your practice
Write about an animal you have actually watched, not an animal you have read about, and be honest about your flinch. The confession of an ungenerous impulse, as in 'Snake', is worth more than any amount of admiration. Then experiment with deliberate repetition: pick one noun in your draft and let it return five times, altering one neighbouring word at each return, and see whether the poem gains a pulse.
Finally, stop treating revision as tidying. Lawrence would rather leave a rough edge than fake a resolution. Ask of every smooth ending you write: did I earn this, or did I just close the box?
Where to start reading
Begin with the animals, then work outward.
What poets can take from this
- Describe a living creature for ten minutes before allowing yourself a single opinion about it.
- Let line length follow attention: lengthen when you look closely, shorten when the thought turns.
- Use repetition as rhythm, repeating a key word with one small variation each time.
- Include the moment you fail to be generous; self-accusation reads as honesty.
- Resist the tidy ending when the experience itself did not resolve.
Try it yourself
Recall an encounter with an animal in which you behaved worse than you wanted to. Write the scene in free verse, in the present tense, and let the poem interrupt itself at least twice to question your own reaction.
Questions
Was D.H. Lawrence a poet or a novelist?
Both. He is best known for novels like Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, but he wrote poetry throughout his life, and his collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) is a landmark of English free verse.
What is D.H. Lawrence's most famous poem?
'Snake' is the most anthologised, a free verse account of meeting a snake at a water trough in Sicily and regretting an act of petty violence. 'Piano' and 'Bavarian Gentians' are close behind.
What style of poetry did Lawrence write?
After early rhymed lyrics he moved to free verse influenced by Walt Whitman, shaped by breath and repetition rather than counted metre. He defended this approach in his 1920 essay on the poetry of the present.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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