[DOWNLOAD] "Transcendental Climbing: Lawrence, Wordsworth, And Romantic Uplift (D.H. Lawrence and) (Critical Essay)" by D.H. Lawrence Review " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
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- Title: Transcendental Climbing: Lawrence, Wordsworth, And Romantic Uplift (D.H. Lawrence and) (Critical Essay)
- Author : D.H. Lawrence Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 90 KB
Description
Because of its melding of natural piety with sexual energy, the oeuvre of D.H. Lawrence might be summed up as Wordsworth Eroticized. Admittedly, such a handily compact label would amount to a drastic oversimplification. To begin with, it elides the erotic elements which, however deflected or submerged, can be found in Wordsworth's poetry. More crucially, it overlooks the robust anti-Romantic strand in Lawrence's sensibility. Still, the affinities between the two writers are sufficiently profound, and sufficiently problematic, to warrant more searching study than they have received. While Lawrence is unmistakably a modern and a revolutionary, he is also an heir of the Romantic tradition that Wordsworth helped to found. Both men made decisive contributions to the body of ecologically engaged writing that has, since their lifetimes, assumed an increasingly urgent relevance. Both Lawrence's indebtedness to the Wordsorthian tradition and his revisionist approach to it are conspicuous in his treatment of mountains, physical and spiritual ascent, and the allied idea of the "sublime." My aim in what follows is to shed light on this under-explored link between Romanticism and modernism. Throughout his career, Lawrence's fiction was impelled by a powerful urge to integrate the human with the natural. In his essay "Aristocracy" he declares: "Man is great according as his relation to the living universe is vast and vital. Men are related to men: including women: and this, of course, is very important. But one would think it were everything" (RDP 371). In his late essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover" he argues that purely interpersonal relations, far from being "everything," are in fact vitiated by the severing of ties with nature: "We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table" (LCL 323). While such sentiments may have an unmistakably Lawrencian flavor, they are by no means sui generis; they have clear Romantic antecedents, with which Lawrence was from an early age intimately familiar. Especially salient are the parallels with Wordsworth, who himself, as M.H. Abrams observes, "inherited a long tradition of finding moral and theological meanings in the aesthetic qualities of the landscape" (102). These meanings were transmitted in their most impassioned form through the concept of the "sublime" in nature, that which "is vast (hence suggestive of infinity), wild, tumultuous, and awful, is associated with pain, and evokes ambivalent feelings of terror and admiration" (98). A sense of the sublime was especially apt to be produced by the contemplation of mountains, and by attempts to ascend them. As Ake Bergvall says, "Ever since Moses saw the back of God on Mount Sinai or Greek poets began invoking the Muses of Mount Helicon, mountains have been associated with oracular inspiration. Scaling the heavens, and providing visionary views of the earth below, they have long carried a heavy metaphorical and metaphysical load" (44).