Postscript: Sandra M. Gilbert 1936 - 2024

I see in the Times that Sandra M. Gilbert has died. She wrote one of my favorite literary studies – Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1972). She held that “descriptive attention” is at the heart of Lawrence’s style. She called him “a poet of pure attention.” She said,

For him the poem is a perceptual experience that the poet himself – and the reader along with him – must undergo, an act of attention whose purpose is epistemological: discovery through a certain process of attention, and the process or experience of discovery is as much the subject of the poem as the ostensible subject itself.

The poem as an act of attention is a brilliant notion. Lawrence conceived it. Gilbert explored and developed it. In doing so, she made a valuable contribution to literary criticism.