Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Lawrence, D. H. - W. H. Auden (essay date 1948)

W. H. Auden (essay date 1948)

SOURCE: "D. H. Lawrence," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, Random House, 1948, pp. 277-95.

[In the following essay, Auden echoes Richard Aldington's assessment that readers should not read Lawrence to reinforce ideologies—which are better expressed elsewhere by other writers—and that his genius lay in his ability to articulate humankind's aggressive and hateful natures. ]

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards,

They 'd be worth looking at.

The artist, the man who makes, is less important to mankind, for good or evil, than the apostle, the man with a message. Without a religion, a philosophy, a code of behavior, call it what you will, men cannot live at all; what they believe may be absurd or revolting, but they have to believe something. On the other hand, however much the arts may mean to us, it is possible to imagine our lives without them.

As a...

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