Early Poetry

Abstract

Lawrence wrote his first poems, the two companion-pieces called Campions and Guelder Roses (854–5), in the spring of 1905, when he was nineteen and a student teacher. The two poems are Lawrence’s earliest surviving literary work, written almost a year before he began his first novel, The White Peacock, as ‘Laetitia’, and two years before the earliest short story or play. He had told Jessie Chambers, when he decided to begin writing, that ‘it will be poetry’, suggesting that he had considered, and for the time being rejected, other literary forms.¹