Keith Sagar – författare

This volume contains almost all of the letters D. H. Lawrence wrote in the last fifteen months of his life: 763 letters, the majority previously unpublished. Despite his failing strength, Lawrence was in constant communication with publishers and agents. He continued to write frequently to his sisters and friends. There is no new fiction for Lawrence to discuss, but there are paintings, poems, the major essays Pornography and Obscenity and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', articles, and his last work Apocalypse. The most dramatic episodes of these months were the seizure of the Pansies manuscript, and the police raid on an exhibition of Lawrence's paintings and the subsequent trial. The subject of his illness becomes ominously more prominent, and Lawrence apologises for letters which lack his customary vitality. The volume includes an introduction, maps, illustrations, chronology and index; full notes identify persons and explain Lawrence's allusions.

In this comprehensive study of D. H. Lawrence's major works, originally published in paperback in 1975, Keith Sagar traces the development of Lawrence's vision and the 'appropriate form' which that vision found at different periods of his life. Dr Sagar sees Lawrence's creative life as falling into four distinct phases: a period of gradual discovery and growth; a period of mature achievement; a phase of moral and artistic uncertainty, even desperation; and a regeneration to a new art and vision. The elaboration and testing of this division, based on close and penetrating analyses of the chosen works, produced what was perhaps the most coherent account of Lawrence's art yet written. Each chapter begins with a full chronology, dating the works of the years in question in order of composition, and there is an extensive bibliography.

Dr Sagar believes that when we see Ted Hughes work as a whole, with each book a stage in a psychic adventure involving new stylistic challenge, we shall see it to be the achievement of a major poet. In this study of Ted Hughes, Dr Sagar gives most of his attention to individual poems, their meaning and coherence, their relation to each other and to the poetic tradition, their sources and background (often in mythology and folklore), and their relevance to living in our time. He began reading Hughes in 1957 when The Hawk in the Ruin appeared, and has followed his development closely ever since: here, with benefit of hindsight, he attempts to retrace that journey. A chapter is devoted to each major work.