Today is DH Lawrence's (David Herbert) birthday.
He was a great writer and well worth celebrating and learning more about.
He was born in England in 1885 and passed away in France in 1930. These were times of much upheaval in the areas where he lived and where he travelled and he was witness to many of these dark events. Being an enlightened and reflective man he wrote extensively about them.
His writing was very pantheistic.
Lawrence venerated nature "because nature is one with and springs from God and God is a great urge, wonderful, mysterious, magnificent. God is not a mind, God is a creative force. God is nameless and imageless. God is the living God, the God of life, the force that creates life. God is life."
Lawrence spoke of humanity having "lost connection to the Life-Force and living as self important, self reliant, self centered ego, a self apart from God."
He had a hatred of machines saying they were "bloodless, having no possible connection with the elemental Life-Force, destroying natural beauty, enslaving bodies and stupefying the minds of they who work for them".
He wrote in 1928 in New Mexico "The whole life effort of man is to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain life, cloud life, thunder life, air life, earth life, sun life. To come into immediate felt contact and so derive energy, power and a dead sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact without intermediate or mediator is the root meaning of religion."
DH Lawrence was genuinely a man of vast depth and perception with an astute intellect. He was very much a reflection of the Romantic movement even though he was born well after the end of it. His mourning at the loss of humanity's heart from nature to industrialism and his belief at the loss of connection to nature puts him squarely within the realms of the Romanticism of the late 19th century.
Sadly he passed away at only 44 years old of tuberculosis (Henry David Thoreau, another splendid pantheistic writer, died of the same disease at the same age).
On the last page of his last book Lawrence wrote "We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."
DH Lawrence was a pantheist whose literature is truly worth the time to get acquainted with.
(DH Lawrence quotes from "Collected Poems" and "Last Poems").
He was a great writer and well worth celebrating and learning more about.
He was born in England in 1885 and passed away in France in 1930. These were times of much upheaval in the areas where he lived and where he travelled and he was witness to many of these dark events. Being an enlightened and reflective man he wrote extensively about them.
His writing was very pantheistic.
Lawrence venerated nature "because nature is one with and springs from God and God is a great urge, wonderful, mysterious, magnificent. God is not a mind, God is a creative force. God is nameless and imageless. God is the living God, the God of life, the force that creates life. God is life."
Lawrence spoke of humanity having "lost connection to the Life-Force and living as self important, self reliant, self centered ego, a self apart from God."
He had a hatred of machines saying they were "bloodless, having no possible connection with the elemental Life-Force, destroying natural beauty, enslaving bodies and stupefying the minds of they who work for them".
He wrote in 1928 in New Mexico "The whole life effort of man is to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain life, cloud life, thunder life, air life, earth life, sun life. To come into immediate felt contact and so derive energy, power and a dead sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact without intermediate or mediator is the root meaning of religion."
DH Lawrence was genuinely a man of vast depth and perception with an astute intellect. He was very much a reflection of the Romantic movement even though he was born well after the end of it. His mourning at the loss of humanity's heart from nature to industrialism and his belief at the loss of connection to nature puts him squarely within the realms of the Romanticism of the late 19th century.
Sadly he passed away at only 44 years old of tuberculosis (Henry David Thoreau, another splendid pantheistic writer, died of the same disease at the same age).
On the last page of his last book Lawrence wrote "We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."
DH Lawrence was a pantheist whose literature is truly worth the time to get acquainted with.
(DH Lawrence quotes from "Collected Poems" and "Last Poems").
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