Thinking Poetically in the Early Discursive Writing: The Birth of the Self

Abstract

The Foreword to Sons and Lovers was never intended for publication. After the publisher had received the text of the novel Lawrence sent it to his editor Edward Garnett as an afterthought, for his attention and not, as Lawrence clearly stated, for the public gaze: ‘I wanted to write a foreword, not to have one printed’ (Letters, I, p. 510). This is just one sign that, for Lawrence, writing was thinking. The Foreword to Sons and Lovers, printed posthumously by Aldous Huxley in 1932 with Lawrence’s letters, has only recently been published with the novel.¹ The Foreword, which seems incomprehensible to many readers, commences the series of discursive, or philosophical, writings, which preoccupied Lawrence all his life, not separable from the fictions and the poetry. Of the discursive works these, primarily, are ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (‘Le Gai Savaire’, 1914); ‘The Crown’ (1915; revised 1925); ‘Goats and Compasses’ (1916, destroyed); ‘The Reality of Peace’ (1917); ‘At the Gates’ (1917, lost); the essays on American literature, where he also developed a ‘psychology’ (begun in 1917); ‘Democracy’ (1919); Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1919); Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921); Etruscan Places (Sketches of Etruscan Places) (1927); Apocalypse (1930). The dates given in parentheses are the dates of composition, not publication.²