Lawrence and the creative process

Style, Summer, 2003 by Jack Stewart

   all language which is genuinely thoughtful, and therefore deeply
   rooted in the aliveness of our experience, and which remains in
   contact with this dynamism, will "sound poetic," because what we
   call the "poetic sound" simply is the polyphonic resonance of deeply
   felt, deeply lived experience--experience really alive in our
   thinking  and saying.
   (Opening 231)

As Coleridge ambitiously observes, "[the] poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity" (173). A style that resonates with thought and feeling is naturally expressive. Lawrence's language in The Rainbow and Women in Love, and in key passages throughout his essays and travel writings, manifests this principle. The opening pages of The Rainbow are a good example: there Lawrence recreates the life of generations of Brangwens on an archetypal level, using Biblical cadences, long rolling periods, and sensuous cyclic images that express the symbiosis of man and nature. "They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth" (Rainbow 9-10). The rhythms of this sentence, with syntactic and imagistic parallelism suggesting propulsive motion and a short interpolated phrase undercutting that motion, mimetically render primal energies in which the fieldworkers' lives are immersed; at the same time, these rhythms mirror the sagalike structure and generational themes of the novel as a whole. This expressive condensation, of mise en abyme, which reduces life and work to timeless ritual, depends on a metaphoric process: the Brangwen men did not consciously "feel" or "know" what they are said to have felt or known; they experienced it directly in the blood at a pre-verbal level.

As Keats says, "the excellence of every Art is its intensity" (260), a principle that Lawrence affirms in "Poetry of the Present" (182-83), where intensity marks poetic moments of being, especially when combined with the poised equilibrium of an achieved vision. Just as Keats describes the revelation of new worlds in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," so does Lawrence in "New Mexico," where space and physical vision suddenly open up new spiritual dimensions:

   But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over
   the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I
   started to attend. There was a certain magnificence in the high-up
   day. a certain eagle-like royalty [...]. In the magnificent fierce
   morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke
   up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new. (Phoenix 142)

Certain keywords and synonyms, containing the nucleus of the experience--"morning," "high up," "magnificence," "awake," "soul"--reverberate throughout the passage accumulating intensity in a sonic and spiritual response that vibrates in tune with the vivid, yet imprecise, visual imagery. Writing from deep experience opens up vision and creates spontaneity, clarity, and authenticity. Here morning and day, sun and space, subsume any recognizable landmarks in an exhilarating sense of expansion. The intensity of Lawrence's perception of being, awakened by the spirit of place, renders space and light at once physical and symbolic: the perceiver is integrated with the environment, in an act of animistic religion. As in the archetypally resonant opening pages of The Rainbow, language and being form a complex unit, in which the process of articulating the experience--of transmuting the sensory into the spiritual and finding an equivalent in words and images--actually deepens its meaning. Lawrence is open to the unknown and to the attendant struggle to articulate "latent knowledge" (Polanyi 103) of "the deepest life-force" and "the deepest physical mind" (Women in Love 314, 318). Defending his pulsating rhetoric, he insists that traces of this creative process "should not be left out in art" ("Foreword" 486). A "to-and-fro" movement, responding playfully or purposefully to "promptings of desire" ("Foreword" 486, 485), revulsion, or revelation marks this creative process. The activity of understanding, working through language, interacts with experience, memory, contemplation, and a loving command of the medium to form a uniquely personal style.