Sunday, January 27, 2019

A worthy appreciation …

… Our perpetual contemporary: the digressive, prescient brilliance of DH Lawrence’s essays. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If Lawrence remains a great writer today that is due in no small part because his enduring freshness and force is found in the travel books, in poems that were scarcely even poems, and in the scatter of his essays. For Lawrence the novel, “the one bright book of life”, was the supreme test; that’s what he staked his life on. But many of his gifts were best displayed elsewhere. 
There are also the short stories and — I have heard — the plays. Studies in Classic American Literature may not be literary criticism in the conventional sense, but it is a prose masterpiece, an accurate and precise account one man's reading experiences. The conclusion of the essay on Whitman — the part that begins, "Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me." — is a wondrous allegro appasionato. Larkin was right that "no one who has really thrilled to Lawrence can ever give him up."

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