Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Lawrence, D. H. - Sandra M. Gilbert (essay date 1980)

Sandra M. Gilbert (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: "D. H. Lawrence's Uncommon Prayers," in D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, edited by Robert B. Partlow, Jr., and Harry T. Moore, Southern Illinois University Press, 1980, pp. 73-93.

[In the following essay, Gilbert agrees with T. S. Eliot's assessment of Lawrence as a hater of orthodoxy, but disagrees with Eliot when he negatively evaluates Lawrence's moral canon.]

. . . we've got the world inside out. The true living world of fire is dark, throbbing, darker than blood. Our luminous world that we go by is only the reverse of this.

—Count Johann Dionys Psanek, in "The Ladybird"

Who gave us flowers?

Heaven? The white God?

Nonsense!
Up out of hell,
From Hades;
Infernal Dis!

—"Purple Anemones"

I

As the title of this essay implies, I have lately been rereading T. S. Eliot's...

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