What is the reaction of critics toward D.H. Lawrence’s works of art?

In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow and was horrified to learn that he was about to be prosecuted for obscenity. He left England in 1919, and after three years’ residence in Italy, left for America, settling in Mexico until the progress of his disease drove him in 1921 back to Italy where his last years were spent. His sensitive spirit was again shocked by further prosecutions for obscenity over the publication in Florence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928.
     While literary scholars will always be divided over Lawrence’s worth as a writer (personally, I have always regarded Sons and Lovers as one of the best books I have ever read), there can be little doubt as to the influence Lawrence had on the younger writers and intellectuals of the 1920s. He challenged them by his attempt to interpret human emotion on a deeper level of consciousness than did his contemporaries. Such an approach provoked either sharp criticism or a near idolatrous respect.
     T. S. Eliot regarded Lawrence as "a writer who had to write often badly in order to write sometimes well". His descriptive passages are often superb, but he had little humor, and this occasionally produced unintentionally comic effects. His burning idealism -- not eroticism -- glows through all his work and the larger proportion of his novels has an enduring strength.