> As
> for the poems -- best that can be said for them is that they suck.
Actually I come back to the poems - the ones particulary when he's
confronting death are quite moving; the language stays within without
falling into the pathos of the subject.
They've been important to me.
Kenneth Rexroth's introduction to D.H. in was it the Harcourt paper edition
in the sixties(?) is both quite rough with D.H. And yet remains taken with
the poems. Rexroth's distinction in that essay between infatuation and
marriage is also very good - re the history of DHL & Frieda's marriage.
In the twenties - as was true in Robinson's Jeffers plays (Alfred Jarry?) -
with post-Victoria and Freud undoing everybody's psychic basket - it was, I
sense, quite hip to unleash all the demons to the max. DHL's demonic
identity confusion within himself and with his audience is why, I suspect,
the work now can come off as blather of one sort or other (or, as we used to
say, "letting it all hang out" and, in retrospect, finding it fun at the
moment, but, later, embarrassing or retro-infantile.
But the poems, I will look again -
Kenneth Rexroth - dead in 1980 something - would be 100 years old this
month. To think I knew him!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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