David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. Though better known as a novelist, his first published works were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both side of the Atlantic. He was charged with obscenity and persecuted during World War I for the supposed German sympathies of his wife, Frieda. Consequently, they traveled around the world, spending considerable time in Taos, New Mexico, where Lawrence became a celebrity attraction. He died in France in 1930.

“Birds, Beasts, and Flowers! is the peak of Lawrence’s achievement as a poet…like the romantics his starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animals or flowers, but, unlike romantics, he never confuses the feelings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them. The lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can.”—W. H. Auden“Lawrence believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon Society.”—Academy of American Poets