The Decomposing Soul's Poet of the Month is...
D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885-1930), English novelist and poet is considered to be among the most influential and controversial literary figures of the 20th century.
Lawrence was born September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner. His mother had been a schoolteacher. The disparity in social status between his parents was a recurrent motif in Lawrence's fiction. In fact, the most significant of his early fiction, "Sons and Lovers" (1913), which was in large part autobiographical, dealing with life in a mining town.
After graduating from the University College Nottingham, Lawrence published his first poems in the English Review in 1909 and his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1911. He goes on to write than 40 books he celebrating the natural, whole, vibrant human being and opposing the artificial and dehumanized version of life and love that society recommended. His novels were misunderstood, attacked and even suppressed because of their frank treatment of sexual matters and life.
In 1912 Lawrence eloped to the Continent with Frieda Weekley, his former professor's wife (sister of the German aviator Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen), marrying her two years later, after her divorce. Their intense, stormy life together supplied material for much of his writing like "The Rainbow" (1915) and "Women in Love" (1921). In this period he also wrote two books of verse, "Love Poems and Others" (1913) and "Look! We Have Come Through" (1917).
Lawrence's life in England became more difficult and stormy during World War I due to his wife's German origin, his own opposition to the war, and Tuberculosis. In 1919 he began a period of restless wandering to find a more healthful climate. His travels provided the locales of several books: the Abruzzi region of Italy for "The Lost Girl" (1920), Sardinia for "Sea and Sardinia" (1921), and Australia for "Kangaroo" (1923). During stays in Mexico and Taos, New Mexico (1923-25), he wrote The Plumed Serpent (1926), a novel reflecting Lawrence's fascination with Aztec civilization. His most original poetry, published in "Birds, Beasts and Flowers" (1923), flowed from his experience of nature in the southwestern United States and the Mediterranean region.
From 1926 on Lawrence lived chiefly in Italy, where he wrote and rewrote his most notorious novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1928) which tells the tale of a sexually fulfilling love affair between a noble woman her husband's gamekeeper. An expurgated version was published in 1932, two years after Lawrence's death in a sanatorium in Vence, France. Lawrence's third and most sexually explicit version of this work was not published until 1959 in the U.S. and 1960 in England; it had been suppressed in both countries until the courts upheld its publication.
Some favorite D.H.Lawrence Links:
The D.H. Lawrence Collection at the University of Nottingham