Black Flowers: A New Light on the Poetics of D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

In March 1927, Lawrence visited the tombs of ancient Etruria, and soon afterwards wrote the fourth and last of his travel books, Etruscan Places. An exhaustive work on the subject by George Dennis was already in existence. It contained descriptions of no less than fifty sites which Lawrence never had the opportunity to examine. Etruscan Places deals with only four burial sites, and although more than a year after his first visit Lawrence was still contemplating a second journey to the ruins, he never went again. Richard Aldington has explained that by 1928 Lawrence was too sick to sustain the fatigue of another Etruscan tour, and that he considered it idle to compete with Dennis, whose explorations had already covered the field. No doubt these were reasons enough for Etruscan Places to remain a fragment, if you regard it solely as a travel book, but I believe there was another reason. On the plane where archeological facts may be found to serve a symbolical purpose, the book was complete. On that plane its theme was no longer the relics of ancient Etruria but something quite different — the principles underlying Lawrence’s conception of poetry. In his travels over the globe (and in March 1927 he had just got back from Mexico), he had searched in vain for a community which was managing to remain immune from the evils of industrial civilisation.