Sunday, September 11, 2011

D.H.Lawrence was born today...



Did you know this writer was so popular with the ladies that his wife had to have his ashes scattered in a concrete memorial to avoid them being stolen?? He rests in beautiful Taos, NM, near the Ring of Enchantment...where you can see this monument for yourself.

As an English major at NYU, reading his works changed the way I looked at life. Had I pursued my PhD, no doubt I would have been teaching a course on him somewhere today...

"It's the birthday of novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence, born in Eastwood, England (1885). His father was a coal miner. He wrote: "The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread." Lawrence called Nottinghamshire "the country of my heart," and he set almost all of his novels in the green hills and woods of that country.

He is the author of Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). He wrote: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not." The Writer's Almanac

He also wrote a novel of Mexico called "The Plumed Serpent" -- this man was both innovative and courageous in his day. Not many like him...then, or now.

2 comments:

  1. "The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread." Lawrence called Nottinghamshire " it's about the same today...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you Alo and you are right of course! We know Lawrence was ahead of his time in so many ways. Thanks for the quote, too. That last sentence is making it's way to my fb page today.

    ReplyDelete