by Giles Romilly
4 It seems to me that no poetry, not even the best, should be judged as if it existed in the absolute, in the vacuum of the absolute. Even the best poetry, when it is at all personal, needs the penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance (Continued in next column) to make it full and whole.' So Lawrence wrote in the Preface to his Collected Poems. In this talk Giles Romilly considers Lawrence's poetry as a vivid record of immediate personal experience and changing mood.