Birds, Beasts and Flowers

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) made a contribution to poetry that, in the words of Louise Bogan, "can now be recognized as one of the most important, in any language, of our time." Birds, Beasts and Flowers, his first great experiment in free verse, was published when he was thirty-eight. This Black Sparrow edition reprints the first edition (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) with a few corrections of typographical errors and the restoration of a number of lines considered indecent in 1923. The cover reproduces D. H. Lawrence's design for the dust jacket of the first edition. Many of these individual poems are popular in anthologies. However, they are best read in the context and continuum of the whole book. In preparing the original collection for publication, Lawrence grouped the poems in a purposeful sequence. For a later printing he prefaced many of the sub-sections with brief quotations from the third edition of John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy.