A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence : Thinking in Poetry

relation of Lawrence's creative work to his philosophical ideas, or to use his own terms, of 'art' to 'metaphysic'. Lawrence uses these terms first in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy' (his use of them may owe something to his reading of Lascelles Abercrombie's work on Hardy), 1 and he takes them up again in Fantasia of the Unconscious: This pseudo-philosophy of mine-'pollyanalytics', as one of my respected critics migh.t say -is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory\_ mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man .... And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. 2 My own research suggested to me that, more often than not, it is the poetry, specifically, which comes first, and in which the more or less conscious metaphysic of all art is present, and that it is out of the poetry that the actual deliberated philosophy, the 'satisfactory mental attitude', is formulated. This turns out, on examination, to be something of a poet's creed; not just, that is, a code of belief which is suited to poetic expression, but one which derives from what was actually poetic expression in the first instance. But the process of 'deducing' or 'abstracting' the 'pseudophilosophy' from the poetry is not quite so objective as Lawrence suggests in Fantasia. What tends to happen is that artistic formulations, preferences, and biases become, unaltered, religious, ethical, and moral standpoints. Kenneth Inniss has noticed this also: we are faced immediately with a radical problem of semantics into which Lawrence, the natural poet, leads us through the inadequacy of his language when he speaks discursively as a philosopher. . . . To take Lawrence at his deepest level of seriousness, to make sense of his art, we have to free ourselves Aidan Burns (1980), and, most interestingly of all, F. R. Leavis, in his book Thought, Words and Creativity (1976). Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-10 Early Poetry....Pages 11-57 Look! We Have Come Through!....Pages 58-101 Birds, Beasts and Flowers....Pages 102-142 Pansies....Pages 143-161 Last Poems and Nettles ....Pages 162-200 Back Matter....Pages 201-241