‘A green fresh poet’: Self-Fashioning, Networking and Marketing the Contemporary Poet

Abstract

Chapter 5 explores how Lawrence understood the necessity of self-fashioning and self-advertisement. The chapter concentrates on Lawrence’s early connections with esoteric poetry circles in literary London as he mixed with Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Florence Farr, Ernest and Grace Rhys and Rachel Annand Taylor. Lawrence wrote a controversial paper on Taylor for presentation at the Croydon branch of the English Association. While in 1909-10 he was fascinated by Taylor’s sensual love poetry, at the invitation of Edward Marsh in 1913 he associated himself with the Georgian Poets and so began his friendship with Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry and other contributors to the little magazine they edited, Rhythm.