The Candid Revelation:
Lawrence's Aesthetics
Lawrence is one of our true prophets, not only in his "madness for the unknown" and in his explicit warning—
and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed
the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
will be bright red with blood.
("Nemesis," from Pansies)
—but in his lifelong development of a technique, a fictional and poetic way in which the prophetic voice can be given formal expression. It is a technique that refuses to study itself closely, that refuses to hint at its position in any vast cultural tradition—unlike that of Eliot, for instance!—and that even refuses, most unforgivably to the serious-minded, to take itself seriously.
The Hostile Sun
Joyce Carol Oates on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence
at Celestial Timepiece
