Signed book: Pansies. First edition, limited issue, numbered 250/250. London: Martin Secker, 1929. Hardcover with dust jacket, 6 x 9, 154 pages. Signed on the colophon in fountain pen, "D. H. Lawrence." Autographic condition: fine. Book condition: VG/VG-, with a closed tear on page 113, a few edge tears and chips to the jacket, chipping at the jacket's spine ends, and a stain to the lower right corner of the jacket.
In the wake of his controversial 1928 masterpiece, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence responded to those critics who flouted the work by writing a series of satirical poems—some of which were published under the title 'Pansies.' Once again, British censors sought to silence his work, viewing it as obscene. When authorities temporarily seized his manuscript, Lawrence proclaimed, 'How sickening this dirty hypocrisy!' Eventually published in 1929, it became Lawrence's best known collection of poems. The title does not refer to flowers, but is derived from the French 'pensees' meaning 'thoughts'—thoughts that, according to Lawrence in his introduction, come 'as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head.'
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