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)

D.H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottingham in 1895, to a father who was a miner and a mother who was a home-based lace-worker. After beginnings as a teacher, Lawrence's work was taken up by Ford Madox Ford and others, and he made a significant mark as a novelist and as a writer of short stories. Often steeped in controversy because of his frank treatment of sexuality, but also because of his elopement with another man's wife-a German national-just before World War 1, Lawrence eventually was to spend many years in voluntary exile in continental Europe, and then in Mexico and the U.S.A. Famous in the wider world for novels such as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and the scandal-struck Lady Chatterley's Lover, he wrote over 800 poems, and several collections of short stories and volumes of essays. He was also an accomplished painter. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence, in the south of France, in 1930.