Birds, Beasts and Flowers

Birds, Beasts and Flowers is a collection of poetry by the English author D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1923. These poems include some of Lawrence's finest reflections on the 'otherness' of the non-human world.

First edition (publ. Martin Secker)

Lawrence started the poems in this collection during a stay in San Gervasio near Florence in September 1920. He continued working on individual poems in Taormina (Sicily), Ceylon and Australia before completing the book in February 1923 whilst staying in New Mexico.

Many of these individual poems are popular in anthologies. However, they also need to be seen within the context of the whole book. In preparing the original collection for publication, the author grouped the poems into the sequence shown in the table of contents and then prefaced many of the sub-sections with brief quotations from the third edition of John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, a book that he was particularly interested in at the time.