The Candid Revelation: Lawrence’s Aesthetics

Abstract

Lawrence’s poems are blunt, exasperating, imposing upon us his strangely hectic, strangely delicate music, in fragments, in tantalizing broken-off parts of a whole too vast to be envisioned — and then withdrawing again. They are meant to be spontaneous works, spontaneously experienced; they are not meant to give us the sense of grandeur or permanence which other poems attempt, the fallacious sense of immortality that is an extension of the poet’s ego. Yet they achieve a kind of immortality precisely in this: that they transcend the temporal, the intellectual. They are ways of experiencing the ineffable ‘still point’ which Eliot could approach only through abstract language.

I am that I am

from the sun

and people are not my measure.

— Aristocracy of the Sun