searcher for Atlantis . I looked down on the blackness where trees filled the quarry and the valley bottoms , and it seemed that the world , my own home-world , was strange again . much of Lawrence is suggested by that one sentence from his earliest novel , the white peacock . his own home-world dominates the novels up to women in love , is the setting of many of the tales , and is the world to which he returns in Lady Chatterley . it is described with a faithfulness that makes Lawrence impressive simply as the recorder of a social scene , but his art , even in the autobiographical sons and lovers , is such as to render the familiar original and mysterious . this power to make the known world strange again is part of his inheritance from the great romantics . the excessive amount of attention at present being given to his treatment of the sexual relationship ( bringing us perilously close to what Lawrence himself despised as sex in the head ) must not be allowed to obscure the more fundamental truth that he was the latest , and the most compelling , writer in the English romantic tradition . Coleridge &apos;s definition of the secondary imagination , with its stress on the transmutation of experience by an essentially creative process into something of visionary freshness , can be taken as an exact description of Lawrence &apos;s art ; and the most illuminating parallel to the symbolic passages of the rainbow and women in love , in which this visionary quality is most apparent , are the moments of revelation in such poems as resolution and independence and the prelude . this , if not precisely the theme of the collection of essays and reminiscences about D H Lawrence edited by Professor Moore , is the underlying truth which they most serve to impress upon the mind of the reader . it is consciously there in Mr Herbert Lindenberger &apos;s Lawrence and the romantic tradition and probably because of this his essay is the one which seems most consistently and most satisfyingly relevant to the actual effects created by Lawrence &apos;s poems and novels . but the frequency with which the contributors to Mr Moore &apos;s miscellany resort to discussion of symbol and myth in Lawrence &apos;s work also draws its justification from the almost Wordsworthian preoccupation with unknown modes of being and fallings from us , vanishings that give Lawrence his distinctively romantic quality . Mr Angelo P Bertocci , for example , picks his way very carefully through the mass of overlapping symbolism in women in love to demonstrate how Lawrence &apos;s imagination expands the details of his story in ever widening arcs of significance , and he borrows from Mr R A Foakes the term image of impression to describe the mode of this symbolism , so linking it with the poetry of Shelley , Keats , Coleridge and Wordsworth . Mr Jascha Kessler , in the myth of the plumed serpent , interprets Kate &apos;s progress towards acceptance of Ramon &apos;s Quetzalcoatl cult in terms of the primitive ritual pattern of separation - initiation - return , and two other contributors see in Lawrence &apos;s use of birds in various parts of his work a conscious remoulding of primitive ritual . such comment is legitimate , but it needs the check of a more inclusive , and at the same time more strictly literary , response . myths as such draw their power from psychological sources and depend upon the existence of a socio-religious culture to which no modern writer has real access ( though he may imagine that he has ) . his use of myth , whether he wishes it to be so or not , can therefore be only part of a larger artistic purpose . the plumed serpent is an excellent case in point . Mr Kessler claims that his analysis of this novel makes all the politics and religious demagoguery seem irrelevant compared with the drama of the hidden primal mythic adventure it subserves . criticism has been misguided and has underestimated the book because it has seized upon the superficial content of the novel and confused it with the story it is really telling . but it was precisely because the primal mythic adventure could not form the total substance of a novel that Lawrence was driven to invent the paraphernalia of a political and religious movement led by Ramon which Mr Kessler rightly regards as superficial . it is impossible to rescue the myth from the novel . one is left with something which the modern reader inevitably finds too thin , too remote , too reminiscent of the world of fairytale ; it will not stand on its own . yet neither will it stand on the matchboard stage that Lawrence has contrived for it . without the reality of a fully created novelistic world the myth is itself superficial and unconvincing . in placing Lawrence within the romantic tradition Mr Lindenberger does not make this mistake . he begins his essay by making the important distinction between what he calls the novel of social relations - which is , in effect , the novel as it has usually displayed itself in English literature , from Jane Austen to Miss Iris Murdoch - and the symbolist novel or romance . Lawrence , of course , belongs to the latter class , and from here Mr Lindenberger goes on to a discussion of Lawrence &apos;s romanticism , the importance of which has already been stressed . but , he then argues , it could be said that : Lawrence in his best work was able to fuse the two traditions , and it may well be that his contribution to the history of the novel will be seen in his success in instilling the dominant strain of English fiction with the essentially poetic materials of the romantic tradition . this argument is just and in the correct sequence ; it puts the emphasis in the right place . the glimpses of unknown modes of being are the most arresting and the most memorable things in Lawrence &apos;s novels , but he is aware that when a novel is given over entirely to the romantic experience it ceases to be a novel . nor is it true to say that the traditional material serves as a foil to set off the episodes in which Lawrence is more deeply engaged . the finest of his symbolist novels , the rainbow and women in love , are also his most substantial achievements in realism . as social history they are already unrivalled , and their characters ( in spite of the now famous letter to Edward Garnett in which Lawrence states that you must n&apos;t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character ) are characters in the good old-fashioned sense of the word . above all , his power to render environment in language that not merely describes but re-creates it ( Mr Mark Schorer writes of this in his contribution to the miscellany , Lawrence and the spirit of place ) embeds the romantic experience in a solid world of sensuous particularity . in these novels there is no question of an inner meaning being the true purpose to which the surface of the novel is irrelevant . they are coherent wholes . the unknown penetrates and fuses with the known to form an indivisible artistic unity . Lawrence the novelist is perhaps now beginning to get his due . the same can not yet be said for Lawrence the poet . Miss Dallas Kenmare has written a small study of D H Lawrence , which is in fact a study of the poetry , but one weakness of that book is its unwillingness to recognize the tough , pawky , realistic side of Lawrence expressed in pansies and nettles . even Mr Alvarez , whose essay in the shaping spirit ( here reprinted by Professor Moore ) is undoubtedly the best thing yet written on Lawrence &apos;s poetry , seems reluctant to give the blunt , sardonic quality its full value . he comments excellently on red geranium and godly mignonette : there is neither a jot of pretentiousness in the poem , nor of vulgarity , though the opportunity for both certainly offered , yet he seems to want to dignify it - oddly enough , by suggesting that it is a poem of wit which , like Donne &apos;s , is a manifestation of intelligence . this is a minor aberration , however . the most important aspect of Lawrence &apos;s realism , his complete truth to feeling , is thoroughly grasped by Mr Alvarez , and the essential effect of balance - the balance of the sharply aware , never half-asleep , whole man - created by Lawrence &apos;s flexibly colloquial language is something which this essay argues so persuasively as to leave the greatness of Lawrence &apos;s poetic achievement beyond doubt . what Lawrence owed to his working-class background has received some attention in recent years , but not enough . the facts are there in Professor Moore &apos;s own biography of Lawrence , the intelligent heart . their full significance has yet to be appreciated . two items in the miscellany have some bearing on this - unintentionally supporting one another . the first is a letter from Katherine Mansfield to S S Koteliansky describing a row between Lawrence and Frieda at Zennor in 1916 . Katherine Mansfield is shocked and bewildered : it seems to me so degraded - so horrible to see I can n&apos;t stand it . ( actually , it reads like a particularly violent farce . Lawrence beats Frieda and chases her round the kitchen table , but the next day gives her breakfast in bed and trims her hat . ) the second is a reprinting from culture and society of Mr Raymond Williams &apos;s essay on the social thinking of D H Lawrence . Mr Williams &apos;s cool remark that comment on working-class life tends to emphasize the noisier factors inevitably throws one back to the Katherine Mansfield letter . Frieda , of course , was a German aristocrat , and by 1916 Lawrence had come a good way from Eastwood , but is it not possible that their middle-class friends were witnessing in these open rows the continuance of a different tradition ? at any rate , Mr Williams is certainly right in his comment that in working-class life ( of Lawrence &apos;s childhood , if not of our day ) the suffering and the giving of comfort , the common want and the common remedy , the open row and the open making-up , are all part of a continuous life which , in good and bad , makes for a whole attachment , and the relevance of this to Lawrence &apos;s own treatment of personal relations hardly needs comment . no one , however , is as good , or as prolific , a commentator on Lawrence as Lawrence himself , and such an immense amount of this commentary is stored away in phoenix that its reappearance now after many years of being out of print is a happening of some importance . phoenix is itself a miscellany , unplanned , yet unified as no other miscellany could be , by the personality of Lawrence himself . some of the things it contains are of rare quality , some interesting for what they add to our understanding of Lawrence &apos;s philosophy , some are comparatively trivial pieces ; but what matters even more than their individual merits is the cumulative effect which they achieve when brought together in this way . the sum even of the novels and poems is greater than the parts , but the existence of a collective meaning , subtly influenced by the presence of the author ( which is always felt in Lawrence &apos;s work ) , can be more easily perceived in the sum of phoenix . the parts can be exasperating . Lawrence &apos;s hectoring manner in democracy grates on the reader , and there are times when his bullying repetitions become insufferable . the incantatory style of the reality of peace is nauseating , and though it is a relief to turn to the bluff no-nonsense of education of the people , this sounds after a while like wilful crudeness . yet overriding these defects is the sense that here is an essentially fine and original intelligence - an energy that drives towards real understanding , as against the neat and clever formulations that are so often passed off for understanding . one &apos;s irritation evaporates . there is much talk in phoenix of the blood-consciousness through which Lawrence sought salvation from the debilitating effects of twentieth-century self-consciousness . sometimes in his hatred of its evils he seems to want to sweep away the whole of modern science and technology . the autobiographical fragment strongly suggests the influence of William Morris &apos;s news from nowhere . but when he is saying more precisely what he means Lawrence makes it clear that the labour-saving machine is a public benefactor : now there is a railing against the machine , as if it were an evil thing . 