Defining Lawrence’s “expository writings not as laboratory reports on experiments successfully concluded but as signposts to a road” traveled in his art, H. M. Daleski notes that these “theories were consistently modified by the artistic experience, which in turn led to further formulations.” Indeed, these continually revised and modified formulations of theories about almost everything constituted what Lawrence called “thought adventures”; in themselves they were signs of a yearning toward wholeness-in-duality that that can account for this writer’s special charisma. For Lawrence was not just a novelist, a poet, and a critic; he was also, in our current rather inadequate terminology, a public intellectual. To be “on the road” with D. H. Lawrence is to be engaged in an extraordinary thought adventure, accompanied by an unfailingly engaged and engaging commentator whose intellectual wholeness-in-duality was of a sort we rarely encounter on the contemporary literary scene. In developing this point, the article also argues that Lawrence’s great intellectual and creative adventure, though acutely modern, was also astutely anti-modernist. Although his early work was championed by such modernist luminaries as Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford, by the end of his career he had become virtually the polar opposite of the quintessential modernist T. S. Eliot. Not coincidentally, perhaps, by the end of his career this thought adventurer addressed his ideas not just to an exclusively high cultural audience of the “fit though few” but to the masses among whom he could be, as he put it, “in the thick of the scrimmage.” January 2000: Sandra M. Gilbert, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis and former president of the Modern Language Association, is the author of seven collections of poetry. Belongings, her latest book of poems, appeared from Norton in 2005, and a prose work, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, was published by Norton in 2006. Professor Gilbert has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death (Norton) and an anthology of elegies, Inventions of Farewell (Norton), along with a number of critical works, including Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, and essays in journals ranging from Critical Inquiry and PMLA to Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review and others. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in such periodicals as Poetry, Field, the Ontario Review, Epoch, the American Poetry Review, American Scholar, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, as well as in a number of anthologies. With Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, she has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination, and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century, volumes 1, 2, and 3: The War of the Words, Sexchanges, and Letters from the Front (all from Yale University Press). In addition, Gilbert and Gubar have coedited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Indiana) and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. With poet and novelist Diana O Hehir, they have edited MotherSongs: Poems By, For, and About Mothers (Norton). With poet-critic Wendy Barker, Prof. Gilbert coedited The House Is Made of Poetry, a collection of essays on the work of prize-winning poet Ruth Stone. |
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