In Tribute to the Angels (1945) the poems persona asks midway through the alchemical process that transmutes

her into a poet: What is this mother/father to tear at our entrails What is this unsatisfied duality which you can not satisfy? (her mother was a musician and an artist who had sacrificed her talents for her husband; her father was a scientist who hoped that his daughter would become another Madame Curie.) H. D. also invokes the figure of a twin-self sister an external objectified self, a thin vibrant and intensely sincere young sort of unsexed warrior (from the novel Her(mione), 1927 in which there are encoded the story of her troubled relationship with Pound and her subsequent affair with Frances Gregg). This search represents for her the construction of an ideal more stable self, one which could free her from the whirling and swirling of hysteria.

H. D. became also involved in cinema, an art she considered quintessentially modernist, writing film reviews for Close Up. The avant-garde film journal to which Gertrude Stein also contributed, was founded and funded by Bryher and edited by Kenneth Macpherson who was also the director of Borderline, a 1930 movie dealing with interracial sexual relations and violence, featuring also Bryher and H. D. Trilogy gathers together three long sequences which were published separately in the mid 1940s: The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels and The Flowering of the Rod. These works reflect H.D.s palimpsestic conception of poetry as layers and layers of language dismembered and re-membered. The poet exorcises destruction, at a time when Nazism and the war were threatening to reduce Western culture to utter ruin, by showing how meaning must be created out of it. She became also interested in Alchemy, esotericism and occultism which become poetical metaphors. Now polish the crucible and in the bowl distil a word most bitter, marah,

a word bitterer still, mar, sea brine, breaker, seducer, giver of life, giver of tears; now polish the crucible and set the jet of flame under, till marah-mar are melted, fuse and join and change and alter, mer, mere, mre, mater, Maia, Mary, Star of the Sea, Mother. (Tribute to the Angels, section VIII)

In the sequence there also emerge a syncretistic image of female divinity as only centre capable of holding and transcending the ruins: Love, the Creator is invoked as a goddess in The Wallsand the last image of the sequence is that of an uncanny childless Virgin venerated by the Magi

Helen in Egypt is H.D.s greatest achievement, an American epic of modern consciousness in which the Trojan War and the dramatic clash of humans and gods parallel the social and political scene in Europe during the first half of the century, the two devastating wars and the personal encounters of the poet. The poem retells Helens story and the creative/destructive effect of her extraordinary beauty from and beyond its many different recorded versions Homer, Stesichorus, Euripides and many other poets closer to H. D.s own time versions in which Helen is vilified as the cause of war or absolved as innocent character in the drama. The beautiful, much-loved, much-hated Helen is transformed into the most adequate symbol of poetry (she herself is the writing) and the most perfect image of the woman poet (she the moment and infinity together).

Helen All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the lustre as of olives where she stands, and the white hands. All Greece reviles the wan face when she smiles, hating it deeper still when it grows wan and white remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees, unmoved, Gods daughter, born of love, the beauty of cool feet and slenderest knees, could love indeed the maid, only if she were laid, white ash amid funeral cypresses.

In its epistemological quest for Helen, the poem incorporates all the complexities of the myth in order to translate Helen into Hellas, H. D.s metaphor for origin, culture, art, and poetry.

Helen (from Helen in Egypt) Thus, thus, thus, as day, night, as wrong, right as dark, light, as water, fire, as earth, air, as storm, calm, as fruit, flower, as life, death, as death, life; the rose deflowered,

the rose reborn; Helen in Egypt, Helen at home, Helen is Hellas forever. The fast pace of the poem, with its short lines of parallel concepts bound together by sense and sound, creates the flash-like concentration of meaning and emotion in the image of Helen: H. D. s conception of poetry as reconciliation of opposites, though not without strife and violence. She showed a way to penetrate mystery, which means, not to flood darkness with light so that darkness is destroyed , but to enter into darkness, mystery, so that it is experienced (Denise Levertov)

At Ithaca Over and back, the long waves crawl and track the sand with foam; night darkens, and the sea takes on that desperate tone of dark that wives put on when all their love is done. Over and back, the tangled thread falls slack, over and up and on; over and all is sewn; now while I bind the end, I wish some fiery friend would sweep impetuously these fingers from the loom. My weary thoughts play traitor to my soul, just as the toil is over; swift while the woof is whole,

turn now, my spirit, swift, and tear the pattern there, the flowers so deftly wrought, the borders of sea blue, the sea-blue coast of home. The web was over-fair, that web of pictures there, enchantments that I thought he had, that I had lost; weaving his happiness within the stitching frame, weaving his fire and frame, I thought my work was done, I prayed that only one of those that I had spurned might stoop and conquer this long waiting with a kiss. But each time that I see my work so beautifully inwoven and would keep the picture and the whole,

Athene steels my soul. Slanting across my brain, I see as shafts of rain his chariot and his shafts, I see the arrows fall, I see the lord who moves like Hector lord of love, I see him matched with fair bright rivals, and I see those lesser rivals flee.
Adonis 1. Each of us like you has died once, has passed through drift of wood-leaves cracked and bent and tortured and unbent in the winter-frost, then burnt into gold points, lighted afresh, crisp amber, scales of gold-leaves, gold turned and re-welded in the sun;

each of us like you had died once, each of us has crossed an old wood-path and found the winter-leaves so golden in the sun-fire that even the live wood-flowers were dark. 2. Not the gold on the temple-front where you stand is as gold as this, not the gold that fastens your sandals, nor the gold weft through your chiselled locks, is as gold as this last years leaf, not all the gold hammered and wrought and beaten on your lovers face brow and bare breast is as golden as this: each of us like you has died once, each of us like you stands apart, like you fit to be worshipped.

THE SUBJECT she pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give face point. That was her self pointed; dart-like; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway) Psychological: the self is no longer unitary and stable but fluid, fragmented, often inconsistent Literature and psychology are equally interested in mental and emotional life consciousness is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. Let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness

(William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890) A new psychological realism devoted to the description of the inner motivations of the subject, reality consisting now in human consciousness (H. James) Woolfs tunnelling: to burrow into the characters pasts to unearth their history. Split beings living in the past and present. Their thought tell us who they are, their memories explain them and reveal how they came to be what they are. Lawrence in a letter to Garnett: You mustnt look in my novel for the old stable ego There is another ego, according to whose actions the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states He is interested in Individuals but not in individualism (the self-assertion of the ego) which he condemns. He only cares about feminine and masculine principles under the veer of civilization. about what the woman

is what she IS inhumanly, physiologically, materially Existential to fulfil ones potential: to become what one is(Nietzsche); be thyself not through knowledge but through life and personal relationship which are transcendent and liberating (Lawrence) With the advent of psychoanalysis the theological search for God had been replaced by the epistemological quest for selfknowledge; enlightenment was not to be found in Christianity or in society but in the self, in individual subjective consciousness. (Childs) Impersonal and post-human, beyond subjectivity, disembodied and dispersed, in abstract art the body is no longer the privileged object of representation, dissolution of the syntax of the self in Futurism: We systematically destroy the literary I in order to scatter it into the universal vibration and reach the point of expressing the infinitely small and the vibration of molecules Thus

the poetry of cosmic forces supplants the poetry of the merely human. (Marinetti) External, pictorial, expressionistic, caricatural (Expressionism: Ensor belgique, Munch sveden; Otto Dix, G. Grosz, Max Beckman: Nuova oggettivit) W. Lewis: I am for the Great Without, for the method of external approach for the wisdom of the eye Vs self-indulgent romanticism of Freuds chaotic unconscious His eyes blazed above a black-bearded grin, with clownesque incandescence. He was black and white, dazzling skin and black patches of hair alternating. His thin knees were unsteady, his hands were hanging in limp expostulation, his grin of protest wandered in an aimless circle (W. Lewis, Beau Sojour, 1909) Butchers large red nose stood under a check cap phenomenally peaked A quizzing, heavy smile broke his face open in an indifferent business-like way. It was a sour smile, as though half his face were frozen with cocaine (W. Lewis, Tarr, 1928)

Gendered: a different subjectivity For the Men of 1914, and especially for Pound and Lewis, what really counted was the organisation of forms, the power of design as the composition and symmetry and balance of structure which might function to order the flux and chaos of modern phenomenal life.(Nicholls) feminine modernist writing: irregular, fluid, elliptical, erasing the separation between subject and object, experimental, subjective, more personal, still I-funded, anti-realistic, elastic, free from syntactical constrictions, moulded on psychological states of mind. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Dorothy Richardson (1873- 1957), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Rebecca West (1892-1983), May Sinclair (1863-1946), Charlotte Mew (18701928), Mina Loy (1882-1966), H. D. (18861961), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Jean Rhys (1890- 1979), Rose Macaulay (1881- 1958), Edith Sitwell (1887-1964). Only recently included in the Canon, they wrote poems, novels, essays, journalism from a female perspective, mixing the genres, moulding their

writing on a female sensitivity and way of being, vindicating the female difference Vs logocentric male homogenizing, apparently neutral, rationalism. PROSE Modern novel: complex, various, open and selfconscious form The Modern Novel in The Common Reader by V. Woolf Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide The writer seems constrained to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability But sometimes, more and

more as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted sense Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of

the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and un-circumscribed spirit? David Herbert Lawrence (novelist, poet, dramatist, essay writer, painter) 1885 born in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, 4th son of a coal-miner and a school teacher with wider cultural and social aspirations. (msalliance, he came from the working class; and inevitably he was class conscious. in his novels working men and aristocrats may be praised, but never the bourgeoisie W. Allen) 1906 became school teacher 1909 poems published by F. M. Ford in The English Review (sent by Jessie Chambers, Miriam in Sons and Lovers) 1911 The White Peacock (Annable: precursor of Mellors, A man with one idea: that all civilization was the painted fungus of rottenness)

1912 Resigned for health problems, eloped with Frieda, the German wife of his College tutor The Trespasser (influenced by German culture and Nietzsches concept of will to power) 1913 Sons and Lovers autobiographical early masterpiece (Freudian self-analysis, emancipation from mother, revaluation of farther heritage) 1914 married Frieda 1915 The Rainbow, banned, marginalized life also for German wife in war period: they were thought to be spies 1920 Women in Love, Italian period originally with The Rainbow unitary project of The Sisters one prototype of which was K. Mansfield (3 generations of Brangwen family, from idyllic organic past to modern individuality and the tragedy of war. Main themes were: woman becoming individual, taking her own initiative and the

establishment of a new relationship between man and woman.) 1922 Aarons Rod, travels to Ceylon, Australia, U.S.A. 1923-4 The Plumed Serpent New Mexico where he funded the community of Rananim 1925 St. Mawr For health reasons came back to Europe (Italy, Germany) 1928 The Woman Who Rode Away, Lady Chatterleys Lover, banned, privately published in Italy, original title Tenderness (2 previous versions: The first L.C.L., John Thomas and Lady Jane) 1930 Dies of tuberculosis in France 1932 expurgated version of L. C. L. published in Britain 1960 Penguin publishes L. C. L. Trial

Various academic critics, including E.M. Forster, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, were called as witnesses. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor asked if it were the kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to read. For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the obscene Publications Act, 1959, at the old Bailey in London from October, 20th to November, 2nd 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of Not Guilty, and thus made D. H. Lawrences last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom. Both in England and in the United States the free publication of the book was a significant event in the cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties

British poet Philip Larkin begins his poem Annus Mirabilis with a reference to the trial Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles first LP Two film version in 1955 and 1981 A television version in 1993 directed by Ken Russell for BBC In 2006 French director Pascale Ferran filmed a French language version, based on John Thomas and Lady Jane edition, which won the Cesar award for best film in 2007 (broadcast in Art channel) In 2006 the novel was adapted for BBC radio as well The vision of his age He was against his age; he loathed it (W. Allen)

Lawrence Vs

Industrialism Competition War Mechanization Standardization Loss of individual creativity Technology Nature violation Loss of Mistery Materialism Enslavement to money Loss of dignity and freedom

Vs

Vs

Vs

Vs

Ideologies Social tensions Loss of intimacy between the sexes Intellectualism Aridity Loss of vital exuberance

Vs

The Novel and its prophetic function Nothing is important but life. For this reason I am a novelist. The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other booktremulation can do. (Why the Novel Matters) I am a man alive, and I intend to go on being a man alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who are all masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole log. L.C.L. 104-5 The quality of his art

D. H. Lawrences voice was apocalyptic, visionary, poetic, expressionist, didactic and sometimes pedantic. Modernist and antimodernist, unconventional and moralist, he was romantic and against sentimentalism, his sexual frankness was part of an existential philosophy which celebrated the soul communion with the universe. Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony and each other has a natural respect for the other. Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body. Lady Chatterleys Lover Times Time of war 5, 9, 64 Mechanic time 20, 44 Seasonal (Mythic) time 19, 25, 49, 67, 87-90, 117-8, 126-7, 171, 258, 312-3 Characters Clifford, 5-6, 45, 108-9

Constance, 6, 21, 72, Mrs. Bolton, 100, 103 Michaelis, 22-3, 24-5 Mellors, 47-8, 147, 228-9 Themes Industrialism, 13-4, 148-9, 166 Classism, 15, 251 Modernist intellectualism, 16-7, 76, 203, 299300 Materialism/Mental life, 38-9, 100, 159 Vitalism, 245, 314-15 Sexuality German experiences, 7, 9 Clifford, 13 Michaelis, 24-25, 30 Phases with Mellors, 92-3,119-20, 122-3, 140-1