Lawrence, D. H. - R. P. Blackmur (essay date 1935)

R. P. Blackmur (essay date 1935)

SOURCE: "D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form," in Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935, pp. 286-300.

[In the following essay, Blackmur argues that Lawrence's poetry is too often marred by the author's unchecked inclusion of biographical detail and personal feelings.]

As a poet, and only to a less degree as a novelist, Lawrence belongs to that great race of English writers whose work totters precisely where it towers, collapses exactly in its strength: work written out of a tortured Protestant sensibility and upon the foundation of an incomplete, uncomposed mind: a mind without defenses against the material with which it builds and therefore at every point of stress horribly succumbing to it. Webster, Swift, Blake, and Coleridge—perhaps Donne, Sterne, and Shelley, and on a lesser plane Marston, Thompson (of the Dreadful Night), and Beddoes—these exemplify, in their...

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