THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: D.H. Lawrence

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is free to all in its entirety as a preview of what paid subscribers enjoy every week: it’s about the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. I discuss Lawrence’s life as the first English working-class novelist, his travails as his sexually explicit and politically rebellious work met with controversy and censorship, and his flight from England across the world from Italy to Australia to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s famous artist colony in New Mexico. I consider his difficult social, political, and metaphysical thought, which some have called “fascist,” and his once celebrated and then despised theories of love and sexuality, with comments on Frances Wilson’s recent Lawrence biography, Burning Man, and on Lawrence’s own most controversial novel, The Plumed Serpent. I then turn to an appreciation of Lawrence’s stylistic move from realism to modernism and his innovative approach to fictional characterization in early stories like “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Prussian Officer.” I consider his ambitious middle-period manifestoes for modernist fiction and for free verse in the essays “Why the Novel Matters” and “The Poetry of the Present.” Finally, I read Lawrence’s later poems “Snake” and “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” as they transvalue the traditional values of the Christian and Enlightened west and become occult and Orphic free-verse hymns to a new interrelation of soul and body, humanity and nature, heaven and hell. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is here:

D. H. Lawrence: Down the Strange Lanes of Hell

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