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Flaubert, the novel was complex, not unlike a poem, in which precisely the right word must be chosen, the mot juste, and combined with a precise and beautiful rhythm to which the novel itself was subject. There were two poets, both contemporaries of Flaubert’s, who first succeeded in freeing literature from the tight constraints to which Flaubert subjected it. One was a Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire, who is the apostle of modernism. In his poems, but especially in his essays on painting and literature, Baudelaire almost single-handedly dragged romantic literature into the modern era. In defining and liberating the modern, Baudelaire invented the prose poem, a genre Rimbaud would perfect at only twenty years old. The prose poem freed literature of the artificial. It was style that renounced formal style in favor of a far more imperceptible one that employs the rhythms of everyday life. The other poet was the American Walt Whitman, who demonstrated that literary form could be annihilated and poetry would not only still exist, it could even be intensified. From Whitman came the Americans—Pound, the greatest craftsman of the new writers, Eliot, Hemingway, and Stein, all of whom in their way were, as Henry Miller would say about Rimbaud, assassins of the old literature.
    In Women in Love, Lawrence took almost equally from these two traditions. From Flaubert and the Symbolists, he took symbolism to give his characters an expanded, if more precisely defined meaning, while in the tradition of the Americans, he let them appear to run free. Though Pound said of Lawrence that he had mastered the modern form before Pound had, it is not true. Pound in his imagist manifesto had decided that the poem should be composed not of feet, as in classical poetry, but of breath phrases, the way that we speak in modulated breaths. This is the technique Lawrence chose for Women in Love; the subject matter and the dialogue as spoken in real life would determine the flow and structure of the novel. This is why to some it appears Women in Love has no structure at all. Great literature, Lawrence came to realize, is the seemingly artless creation of everyday life, with its rhythms, its immediacy, its truthfulness, and its life-and-death struggle with the problems of existence, with just enough art to give it definition and to make us think it is directly drawn from reality, even when we know we are being manipulated. “If it does not seem a moment’s thought,” writes Yeats, “our stitching and unstitching have been naught.” For this one needs a very great writer, and this is what Lawrence was when he created Women in Love.
     
    Norman Loftis is a poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher, and film-maker. His works include Exiles and Voyages (poetry, 1969), Black Anima (poetry, 1973), Life Force (novel, 1982), From Barbarism to Decadence (1984), and Condition Zero (1993). His feature films include Schaman (1984), the award-winning Small Time (1989), and Messenger (1995). He is currently Chair of the Department of Literature at the Brooklyn Campus of the College of New Rochelle and is on the faculty at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, where he has taught since 1970.

FOREWORD
    D. H. Lawrence
     
     
     
    This novel was written in its first form in the Tyrol, in 1913. It was altogether re-written and finished in Cornwall in 1917. So that it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself: I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.
    The book has been offered to various London publishers. Their almost inevitable reply has been: “We should like very much to publish, but feel we cannot risk a prosecution.” They remember the fate of The Rainbow, and are cautious. This book is a potential sequel to The Rainbow.
    In England, I would never try to justify myself against any accusation. But to the Americans, perhaps I may