No J5” the MAKING of a POET Hubertien H. Williams A
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no J5” i D. H. LAWRENCE: THE MAKING OF A POET Hubertien H. Williams A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1968 Approved by Doctoral Committee \ « Copyright 1969 by Hubertien H. Williams ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Maqy people have contributed in many ways to the completion of this study. To all of them: thank you. But special acknowledge ment is due those few without whose assistance none of this would have come about. The study represents the end product of three years of grad uate work made possible by a National Defense Education Act fellowship awarded through Bowling Green State University. It represents the end product of a most rewarding association with members of the English Department there. Particularly I am grateful to Dr. John J. Gross who patiently guided me through a thesis and was still willing to serve as adviser for the dissertation. He is the epitone of the scholar, learned, kind, and generous with his knowledge. Dr. Richard Carpenter and Dr. Frank Baldanza gave freely of their time and asked just the right questions when they were most desperately needed. To these three men I am particularly grateful. The University of Chattanooga also gave generously of both time and money to see the study to completion. Dr. James Livingood, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor George Connor, Chairman, Department of English, have been more than considerate in arranging scholarships as well as released time from teaching and committee work. Dr. William H. Masterson, President of the University of Chattanooga, however, merits a special acknowledgement for his efforts to see that the faculty has every opportunity to pursue their scholarly interests. We are all indeed grateful for his guidance. ii Professor Barry Chambers, University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, gave many hours over a period of two summers to a running discussion of the achievement of D. H. Lawrence. He provided me with many insights which I would not otherwise have achieved, and I am very grateful to him for giving so generously of his time and knowledge. Finally there is my family: My children, Dick, John, Tina, and Beth, have contributed in ways far beyond measure. How can one adequately acknowledge a remark delivered by Beth, age seven, who, as she helped proofread the final draft, commented, "But this is beautiful!" To my parents, Edward William Rapp and Hubertien Gerard Rapp: thank you for making it possible for me to Be. To my husband, John Henry Williams: thank you for understanding and for letting me Be TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PACE I. THE POETIC VISION: THEME AND DEFECT........................................ 1 H. VIRGIN YOUTH.................................................................................... 8 III. MAN AND WOMAN................................................................................... 40 IV. MAN AND NATURE............................................................................... 84 V. MAN AND SOCIETY............................................................................... 126 VI. MAN AND DEATH................................................................................... l?0 VII. AN EVALUTAION................................................................................... 197 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................ 205 T—’ I CHAPTER I THE POETIC VISION: THEME AND DEFECT A poet by definition is simply one who composes poetry, but a true poet, as opposed to the mere versemaker or the rhymster, writes poetry to discover what he has to say. His first task must be the creation of the poet, but creation of poet and poem go hand in hand. The poem is an act of discovery for it constantly reveals two things: the poet’s theme, and the poet’s defect.3- That is, the poem reveals to the poet what it is the poet is attempting to say, but the poem also shows the poet where he has failed, where he has fallen short. Therefore, as a poet progresses, he continually searches for the answer to two questions: what it my theme? and what is my defect? The poet continually works to communicate his vision. When the poet's vision is larger than the poet, then the poet must write and write again, for the poem only approximates rather than encompasses the vision, and therefore each poem is in a way defective. Few are the artists who can declare with lily, "I have had my vision,"2 for the vision is always in the making. D. H. Lawrence, a true poet, spent a lifetime attempting to communicate his vision. Underlying the vision is a theme that infuses ^The idea for "theme" and "defect" was suggested by Hayden Carruth, "A Meaning of Robert Lowell," Hudson Review, XX (Autumn 1967-1968), 437 ff. ^A character in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse who is able to complete the last stroke of her painting as the Ramsay family reaches the lighthouse. 2 all his poetry, that links the poems one by one and volume by volume, that provides the very raison d’etre of the poems. Vfe shall observe Lawrence working away at communicating his vision, a vision which he himself doesn’t completely understand, a vision only dimly felt and expressed in his earliest poems, gradually felt more sharply, there fore revealing itself more sharply in the poems as the poet is created and as the theme becomes clearer to the poet, even though finally it can never find full expression in any one poem. One watches fascinated the struggle of the poet to communicate his vision; we see the change in poetic technique as the poet is created, and the change in subject matter as the theme gradually emerges although the theme itself remains essentially unchanged. There is constant effort to clarify the theme, to reveal the essential statement, to get to the bedrock of the poetic vision. Part of our problem in evaluating Lawrence’s poetiy is due to the poet’s modernity. A. Alvarez makes the distinction between "con temporary" and "modern" when he comments of W. H. Auden: If Auden is contemporary (and he seems to me much more "contempo rary" than "modern," with all that last word, in its best sense, implies of profound originality), he is so in the way a journalist is contemporary. That is, his business is to observe accurately, to present succinctly and to comment. His comment should be pointed, it should be allusive to what is happening there and then, to fashionable ideas and theories; but within these limits it should be easy. The journalist is not, in short, ever called on to think particularly painfully. His business is with the surface of things, not with their real nature.3 How little this description of "contemporary" fits Lawrence, for in 3 A. Alvarez, Stewards of Excellence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 94. 3 Lawrence we do discover a profound originality, one attribute of modernity. Furthermore, Lawrence is never easy, and surely despite the painful thinking involved, Lawrence wrestled not with the surface of things but with their real nature. In the answers he discovered we find Lawrence is well ahead of his time, m an exceedingly per ceptive study of Lawrence’s ideas, Father Tiverton as early as 1951 recognized affinities between Lawrence’s thought and ideas expressed by Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber, ideas which are only now undergoing serious consideration and finding general acceptance. For example, Tiverton quotes Martin Buber's words, "all real life is meeting," and shows the strong affinity of Buber’s statement with Lawrence’s essential theme as we shall see later. But Lawrence's modernity extends in still another direction. Stephen Spender thinks the major problem confronting the modem artist is his lack of a closed system, the kind of closed system available to every writer up until the artist began to feel the dislocation and fragmentation brought about by the industrial 5 revolution. The modern artist has had to work within sane created framework of reference such as a Marxist or Freudian tradition, or he had to create a framework of his own: he may create his own myths as did Yeats; or he may turn to the past to create a set of values in a valueless present as did Pound and Eliot and finally Auden; or h. Father William Tiverton, D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Ltd., 1951),» p. 106. ■^From an address by Stephen Spender at The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, Spring 1967. 4 he may create his own system of values as did Lawrence and Lowell. Carruth could as easily be describing Lawrence when he says of Robert Lowell that Lowell is in fact making his life as he goes along, and with a degree of seriousness and determination and self-awareness that sur passes the artistic confidence of any previous generation. He has resolved to accept reality, all reality, and to take its fragments indiscriminately as they come, forging from them this indissoluble locus of metaphoric connections that is known as Robert Lowell. Carruth writes of modernity that "the old idea of the enclosed work of art was dislocated in the minds of serious artists: Heine, Rim baud, Strindberg. Such men began to see that art is always unfinished." He continues, "artists had moved from an Arnoldian criticism of life to an Existential creation of life,"’'7 the latter phrase a perfect description of Lawrence’s art and of his very modernity. We need not concern ourselves with the question of Lawrence’s essential truth at this point. All truths may be relative. Lawrence's truth, relative or not, was for him essential to the assertion of his life-force, to his Existential creation of life. Lawrence never played with truth. He was basically and essentially an honest man, and he told truth as he saw it. Vfe will instead listen carefully to what the poet has to say before we pass judgment on the validity of his pro nouncements .