The Rocking-Horse Winner, D. H. Lawrence - W. D. Snodgrass (essay date 1958)
W. D. Snodgrass (essay date 1958)
SOURCE: "A Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way to Live," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Summer, 1958, pp. 191-200.
[Snodgrass was an American poet, educator, and critic, whose books included the highly-regarded poetry collection Heart's Needle (1959). In the following essay, one of the seminal studies of "The Rocking-Horse Winner, " he explores the use of symbols in the story and comments on Lawrence's philosophy of sex and life and how these ideas impact the tale.]
"The Rocking-Horse Winner" seems the perfect story by the least meticulous of serious writers. It has been anthologized, analyzed by New Critics and force-fed to innumerable undergraduates. J. Arthur Rank has filmed it. Yet no one has seriously investigated the story's chief structural feature, the symbolic extensions of the rocking-horse itself, and I feel that in ignoring several meaningareas of this story we ignore...
[The entire page is 4778 words long]
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