Look! We Have Come Through!

Lawrence ... describes the poems [in this first collection of his unrhymed poems] as "intended as an essential story, or history, or confession", the critical experience occurring in the period of, "roughly, the sixth lustre of a man's life" - that is, from the age of 25 to 30. His Argument emphasizes the dramatic nature of the sequence. He speaks of "the protagonist" and of "the conflict of love and hate [that] goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness". Foreword and Argument complement each other: Look! is both a personal confession and a drama. In both respects, it is closely related to the three novels which belong to the same period, 1912-1917. (From Jeremy Hooker's Introduction)