Counter-Currents
Remembering D. H. Lawrence:
September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930
Greg Johnson
353 words
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England and died from tuberculosis on March 2, 1930 in Vence, France, at the age of 44.
The fourth son of a nearly-illiterate coal miner, Lawrence rose by dint of genius and hard work to become an internationally famous, often censored, and sometimes persecuted novelist, poet, essayist, and painter.
Underlying Lawrence’s writings was a visionary “vitalist” philosophy which affirmed the primary reality of life and criticized Christianity, science, technology, democracy, and feminism for suppressing, deforming, and profaning the life force.
Lawrence was also a man of the Right. A frank elitist, he rejected egalitarianism, liberalism, and democracy in favor of a hierarchical, organic society ruled by a dictator — a society that gave priority to aesthetic, cultural, and eugenic values. Lawrence also had strongly ecological and neopagan sensibilities.
Lawrence was astonishingly productive in his 44 years. His best-known novels are Women in Love, Sons and Lovers
To learn more about Lawrence, consult the following writings on Counter-Currents:
By Lawrence:
- “Benjamin Franklin”
- “D. H. Lawrence on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels”
- “D. H. Lawrence on Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels”
- “D. H. Lawrence on Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo”
- “D. H. Lawrence on Moby Dick”
- “‘The Great Death Continent’: D. H. Lawrence on America”
- “The Spirit of Place”
- “Whitman”
About Lawrence:
- Kerry Bolton, “D. H. Lawrence” (from Artists of the Right) (French translation here)
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence on America,” Part 1, Part 2
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence on Idealism and Evil”
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence on Men and Woman,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence on the Unconscious”
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Idealism”
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Modernity,” Part 1, Part 2
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Reductionism”
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence’s Phallic Traditionalism”
- Derek Hawthorne, “D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: Anti-Modernism in Literature,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
- Robert Steuckers, “Paganism and Vitalism in Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence,” Part 1, Part 2
2 comments
I am half way through The Complete Poems of DH Lawrence. I had just thsi afternoon finished reading the following ;
Sun In Me by DH Lawrence
A sun will rise in me
I shall slowly resurrect
already the whiteness of false dawn is on my inner ocean
A sun in me
and a sun in heaven.
and beyond that, the immense sun behind the sun,
the sun of immense distances, that fold themselves together
within the genitals of living space,
and further, the sun within the atom
which is god the atom
The great naturalist Edward Abbey wrote an essay about Thoreau. He lampooned Thoreau’s 19th century type earnestness, awkwardness, and celibacy – yet at the same time he bowed to the ultimate beauty of his vision. Once when asked about his celibacy he said, “All of Nature is my Bride.” I feel much the same about Lawrence. The Poem quoted above is knocking at the door of the inner mysteries. And I was greatly moved by the end of Lady’s Chatterly’s Lover when the Gardner yearns for his brothers across time and space to join him in battle against those who were destroying what was left of the natural life of England.
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