Ecocriticism is, in part, the study of the relationship between man and his natural environment. I therefore propose to look at this relationship from the perspective of smells in the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. How is nature imagined and poetically represented through evocations of human, non-human, natural and artificial odours? Smell has repeatedly been defined as a “lower,” even primitive, sense. Lawrence, regularly defined as the poet of sensuality nonetheless ascribes only relatively little attention to olfaction. So, when he does, the poetic effect is worth analysing. Whether to insist on the contiguity between man and nature or, on the contrary, to evoke a (physical or metaphorical) polluted environment where the air is a noxious obstacle (like “the petrol fumes” or “exhaust gas” of “In the Cities” [CP 703-4], “the exhaust smell of people” [“Lonely, Lonesome, Loney – O!,” CP 646]), Lawrence’s references to olfaction are repeatedly inscribed in the relationship of man with his environment (whether “natural” or “artificial”). Smelling therefore appears as a mode of being in the world. From the perspective of ecocriticism, circulating odours and smells in poetry are definitely not envisaged as solutions: smells are symptoms of a blossoming or rotting nature, or nature under threat; or they are traces of humanity inscribed in nature (“Cypress shadowy / such an aroma of lost human life!” (“Cypresses,” CP 298)). In that sense, as they appear in Lawrence’s work, smells (material and metaphorical) may therefore sometimes acquire a prophetic dimension: bearing in mind that olfaction is a highly subjective experience, to what extent can the I-voice “smell” the upcoming environmental changes? Lawrence argues that we must “open all the doors of consciousness / and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed” (“Nemesis,” CP 515).