D H Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is best known as a novelist but his first-published works were poems. His poetry had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic. He created poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Filled with his views that were radical for his time, his poems contained bitter satire and sexuality that expressed his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon society. He regarded sex and nature as cures to what he considered the evils of modern industrialized society. His work was seen as controversial and he was often involved in censorship cases. The most widely publicized of which was his novel "Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928).

 

 Due to his problems with censorship, Lawrence self-published "Lady Chatterley's Lover" with the help of Florentine bookseller Giuseppe Orioli. With more than 1000 copies selling for 2 guineas each, the book was a success. Since it had not been copyrighted, pirates soon began to cut into the profits with black market copies. It has been said that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" won the half century fight for sexual liberation in English writing.  His wife, Frieda, wrote that he tried to raise sex from a mere animal function to a truly human all-embracing activity.

 

 Facing troubles with censorship and the supposed pro-German sympathies of his wife, Frieda Von Richthofen a cousin of the infamous Red Baron Von Richthofen, during World War 1, Lawrence traveled the world looking for a place to call home. His travels took him to Italy, Germany, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the French Riviera, Mexico and the United States. His time in Taos, New Mexico is where he became the center of a group of female admirers who considered themselves his disciples and their quarrels for his attention became literary legend.

 

As a writer of some of literatures most sensual stories and poems, Lawrence did not support pornography.

"But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously... you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit." According to Lawrence, the common man degrades sex and has "as great a hate and contempt of sex as the greyest Puritan... they have the grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow disease of dirt-lust."