D H Lawrence is well-known as a novelist, slightly less celebrated as a poet and a writer of some truly wonderful short stories. But how should we categorize his poetry? Can he be labelled, and analyzed as, ‘imagist’? Here is his fine short poem ‘Green’, which was published in the first anthology of imagist poetry, Des Imagistes, in 1914:

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The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.

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Think about the words and the unspoken meaning in the second stanza.

"D. H. Lawrence is one of those writers that go and in out of favour, according to the tastes of the times and, frankly, in the early part of the twentieth-first century, when earthy sex is not all that high on the agenda, he looks more and more irrelevant. His reputation may well have been at its highest in the Sixties when the idea of getting back in touch with nature, primarily through sex, was more in tune with the Zeitgeist than it is now."