JOLLY DAYS

DH Lawrence

DH Lawrence rejeced the formalism of Eliot and Joyce, embracing the doctrine of creative impersonality.

From a 1915 letter to Gordon Campbell,

“…feeling that one is not only a little individual living a little individual life, but that is in oneself the whole of mankind…Not me — the little vain, personal DH Lawrence — but that unnameable me which is not vain nor personal, but strong, and glad, and ultimately sure, but so blind, so groping, so tongue-tied, so staggering.”

Lawrence's yearning for the transcendence of self is a spiritual and aesthetic expression. He was a prefigurement of the 1960s counterculture, for good and ill.