David Malouf (1934 – 2026) at Sydney Review of Books:
Each lover of Lawrence’s poems will have his own story of first contact with a new and unique consciousness. Lawrence was the first entirely modern poet I was presented with and, except for what I had picked up from films – the accidental influence, in Hollywood movies of the late thirties and early forties, of German Expressionist theatre and décor and, on the soundtrack, German contemporary music – the first modernist sensibility. I was twelve, going on thirteen, in my first months at Brisbane Grammar. As the bright Latin form, we were skilled at the sort of analysis and parsing that in those days was regular drill in Queensland primary schools, so we did nothing in our English class but read. The Lawrence poem in our class anthology was ‘Snake’, and it was like no other poem I had ever heard – I say ‘heard’ because poetry always began for me in those days as a reading aloud. I did with it immediately what I had been encouraged to do with any poem that in some way stuck me, or which puzzled or eluded me. I got its music into my head (_prima la musica_), and its logic or lack of logic, by learning it off by heart. Like many poems learned by heart at that time, it is still with me.
What mesmerised me was the poem’s rhythms, and the perfect ease with which the lines, long or short, contained each thought and added it to the ‘story’.
more here.
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