Abstract
Literary influence permeates the culture at different levels of recognition and consciousness. At one end of a hypothetical continuum, echoes of a strong literary presence are quick, referential tags, like brand-name recognition; at the other, they penetrate more deeply, seeming to become a central part of the consciousness and perspective through which subsequent fictional experience is seen and presented. With the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, the process assimilating the distinctive literary voice into the general culture has been going on since the 1950s, along with a growing critical understanding of Lawrence’s art. Earlier, when Lawrence was likely to be hailed uncritically as prophet or excoriated as demon, roles magnified by his iconoclasm, his singular voice, and the many controversies he both provoked and engendered, his work seemed entirely new and strange, not part of a discernible literary tradition. Critics polarized, regarded him as issuing the call for salvation or fulminating clouds of pernicious nonsense, often playing him in tandem against Joyce, one or the other the reigning genius, the scourge or the end of modern fiction. But time and judgment have humanized Lawrence and connected him with a literary past.
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Notes
D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places (London, 1974), pp. 146–147.
D. H. Lawrence, Letters: Volume I, 1901–1913, ed. James Boulton (Cambridge, England, 1979), p. 503.
D. H. Lawrence, “Poetry of the Present” [Introduction to the American edition of New Poems (1919)], in Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York, 1964), pp. 182–183.
Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. with introduction and notes by Julius Elias (New York, 1966), p. 110. It should be noted that the translation of the key terms of this work, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, is problematic, for “naive” and “sentimental” carry connotations in English that are foreign to Schiller’s argument. “Simple,” “unreflective,” and “direct” hint at Schiller’s intended meaning for the first term; “complicated,” “self-reflecting” and “sophisticated” point to the second.
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 212.
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1924), pp. 165–166, 164.
Sandra Gilbert, “D. H. Lawrence’s Uncommon Prayers,” D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, ed. Robert Partlow, Jr. and Harry Moore (Carbondale, Illinois, 1980), p. 76.
Marjorie Perloff, “Lawrence’s Lyric Theater: Birds, Beasts and Flowers,” D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed. Peter Balbert and Phillip Marcus (Ithaca, N. Y., 1985), p. 128.
For arguments asserting that influences on Lawrence also included Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Friedrich Nietzsche, see the respective chapters in D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London, 1985).
Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston, 1981), p. 87.
W. H. Auden, “Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence,” Nation, 164 (April 26, 1947), 484.
R. G. Cox, “The Poetry of W. H. Auden,” The Modern Age: Volume 7 of the Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (Baltimore, 1964), p. 383.
John Bayley, The Romantic Survival (New York, 1957), p. 196.
See his letter (May 9, 1934) to Pamela Hansford Johnson, in Dylan Thomas, Selected Letters, ed. Constantine FitzGibbon (New York, 1966), p. 122.
Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning (London, 1954), p. 14.
Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London, 1982), p. 23.
Edward Lucie-Smith, “The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence—With a Glance at Shelley,” D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender (New York, 1973), pp. 226–227.
Calvin Bedient, Eight Contemporary Poets (Oxford, 1974), p. x.
Stephen Spender, World Within World (London, 1953), pp. 83–84.
A. Alvarez, “Lawrence’s Poetry: The Single State of Man,” D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed., Stephen Spender (New York, 1973), pp. 210–211.
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© 1987 James Gindin
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Gindin, J. (1987). Lawrence and the Contemporary English Novel. In: Meyers, J. (eds) The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08308-4_3
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