New Heaven and Earth: D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

The extraordinary influence of D. H. Lawrence is largely based on his evangelistic call for the return by modern men and women to what he called ‘phallic consciousness.’ ‘My great religion,’ he wrote, ‘is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.’ There is a magnetically, violently hostile side to this ‘religion.’ In order to break down the false worship of the intellect and ‘make a new world,’ Lawrence held, one must yield to the subconscious ‘urge of life that is within.’ One must forget self-consciousness and surrender to the ’stirring half-born impulse to smash up the vast lie of the world.’ So Lawrence takes the revolutionary directions of modern thought and gives them a special turn. The suppressed physical life must burst into its own; the mechanized cerebral, overpurposive character of our civilization must be exploded away. Lawrence did not invent this program; Yeats and Pound go a better part of the way with him, and Blake and others foresaw that way long ago. The difference lies mainly in a certain tone, or emphasis, behind Lawrence’s subordination of everything, even his art, to the program. Also, it lies in the nearness of his work to common life. However alienated his argument and however exotic his subject matter may at times be, he is at the same time extremely interested in the details of life among the most ordinary men and women. The interest is intimate, gossipy almost — the kind of interest one has in people one knows unusually well. Finally, Lawrence speaks in his own right, and directly to the point. He dares to expose his emotions, to risk seeming sentimental or ludicrous.