Art for Life’s Sake: Essays on D.H. Lawrence

The late Keith Sagar produced over fifty years a stream of essays, introductions and lectures on Lawrence, fourteen of which are collected here. Four have not been previously published, and this collection brings most of others back into print. Of Keith Sagar’s first book, The Art of D. H. Lawrence (1966), Vivian de Sola Pinto wrote that it marked the start of serious Lawrence scholarship in England. Alastair Niven described Sagar’s Calendar of Lawrence’s Works (1979) as ‘indispensable, fascinating and almost certainly as authoritative a literary calendar as we could expect for any writer’. John Worthen described The Life of D. H. Lawrence (1980) as ‘the best single-volume biography of Lawrence’. Keith Brown, reviewing D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art in the Times Literary Supplement in 1985 wrote: ‘Criticism of Dr Sagar’s book is well-nigh impossible. It is clearly going to be there as long as formal Lawrence studies survive’. Of his latest book, D. H. Lawrence: Poet (2008), Christopher Pollnitz wrote: ‘Keith Sagar has done more than any other critic to reshape understanding of Lawrence as poet.