D. H. Lawrence: the Hero-Poet as Letter Writer

Abstract

Of D. H. Lawrence’s letters it can be said, as Lionel Trilling once said of John Keats’ letters, that they give a picture of a certain kind of man: a hero. There are, of course, different kinds of heroes and different gradations of heroism. In Keats, according to Trilling, we discern a heroic vision of the tragic life and the tragic salvation, ‘the soul accepting the fate that defines it’.¹ Lawrence’s conception of heroism is far more passional than tragic, or, as he himself wrote in the Preface to his play Touch and Go (1922): ‘Tragedy is the working out of some immediate passional problem within the soul of man.’² In his Introduction to Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo, Lawrence laments the absence of heroic awareness, and hope, and insists on the primacy of heroic effort, ‘that instinctive fighting for more life to come into being’. For Lawrence, modern man’s tendency to make the hero self-conscious and introspective reduces the possibility of splendour and self-enhancement. ‘Life’, he declares, ‘without the heroic effort, and without belief in the subtle, life-long validity of the heroic impulse, is just stale, flat and unprofitable’.³ In his own life, heroic effort characterised Lawrence’s struggle ‘for more life to come into being’.

‘But the great are near; we know them at sight’.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)