[Red Willow Trees - Painting by D.H. Lawrence]
D.H. Lawrence was born to a mining father and an educated mother who devoted her life to seeing to it that her children made it out of the working class life in which they were born. Lawrence always sided with his mother whenever his parents fought because she, to him, was more refined than his harsh and sometimes drunken father. Lawrence escaped the working class life by way of education - becoming a teacher, then eventually a writer.
It is in his writing that we see his expression of the "deep-rooted, the elemental, the instinctual in people and in nature. He is constantly at war between the mechanical and the superficial, with constraints and hypocricies that civilization imposes." Lawrence believed in intuition and the darker aspects of the inner-self that he felt must be dealt with and overcome. It seems he was interested in exploring the many facets upon which humans operated. He claimed, "poetry must be spontaneous, flexible, alive, direct utterance from the instant, whole man, and should express the pulsating, carnal self." (Greenblatt, p. 2576)
He explores human relations with an uncanny psychological precision and intense poetic feeling. His novels have an acute realism, a sharp sense of time and place, and a brilliant typographical detail; at the same time they're high symbolism, both of the total pattern and the incidents and objects within it establish a formal and emotional rhythm. (p. 2575
D.H. Lawrence appears to be a man with a great interest in psychology, for he is always writing about it. It also seems he has an innate sense or perception uncommon to other men, as he likes to explore the human psyche and emotions and the relationships that result.
Consider this passage from Sons and Lovers -
“You have a place in my nature which no one else could fill. You have played a fundamental part in my development. And this grief, which has been like a clod between our two souls, does it not begin to dissipate? Ours is not an everyday affection. As yet, we are mortal, and to live side by side with one another would be dreadful, for somehow, with you I cannot long be trivial, and, you know, to be always beyond this mortal state would be to lose it. If people marry, they must live together as affectionate humans who may be commonplace with each other without feeling awkward- not as two souls. So I feel it. I might marry in the years to come. It would be a woman I could kiss and embrace, whom I could make the mother of my children, whom I could talk to playfully, trivially, earnestly, but never with this dreadful seriousness. See how fate has disposed things. You, you might marry, a man who would not pour himself out like fire before you. I wonder if you understand- I wonder if I understand myself.”
Work Cited:
Greenblatt, S. et al. (Eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature: The Romantic Period through the twentieth Century and After. (8th ed., Vol. B). pp. 2575-76. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. 1913. United Kingdom: Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. 1913. United Kingdom: Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.