Report of the Fifty-First Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group

Peter Brennan

‘D. H. Lawrence and Post-Modern American Poetry: ‘The incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment’

July 24th 2026, 18.30-20.00 UK time

 

ATTENDERS

51 people attended, including, outside of England, Emma Julieta Barreiro in Mexico City, Feroza Jussawalla in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Adam Parkes in Athens, Georgia, Philip Chester in Deep River, Ontario, Jim Phelps in Cape Town, Tim Gupwell in Perpignan, Nesrin Eruysal in Ankara, Muzulman Abbas in Pakistan, and Jingting Wang in China.

INTRODUCTION

Peter writes: ‘The lecture seeks to clarify the nature and significance of Lawrence’s influence on William Carlos Williams and on subsequent major American poets who acknowledged Williams’s example. By way of contrast, the largely negative response to Lawrence’s poetry in England is understood as an aspect of English pusillanimity in the face of the achievements of their own great Romantic poets, and their consequent disinclination to embrace those Modernist principles to which Lawrence gives exuberant expression in his seminal essay, ‘The Poetry of the Present’.

The lecture goes on to examine how Lawrence’s impact was crucial to ensuring that English Romanticism reached its mid-century apotheosis not in London, but in New England, New York and San Francisco, principally in the work of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Frank O’Hara. The presentation concludes by suggesting that the heir to this tradition is Bob Dylan, whose conception of song writing and performance is perhaps the most compelling manifestation in our time of the Blakean ‘eternal moment’ which Lawrence had sought to enact in his own poetry decades earlier.

The text of the lecture is available on request [write to catherine@catherinebrown.org], as is the accompanying copiously illustrated 49 page handout, providing context, evidence and extensive bibliography.’

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Brennan bought his first book of Lawrence’s poems aged 15. Since then he has devoted most of his life to the study, teaching and publication of poetry. He was for many years Head of English at The Latymer School, Edmonton, and subsequently compiled and taught over 60 literature courses at City Lit, Holborn. Since 2023 he has pursued his teaching and mentoring work exclusively online, including courses on Lawrence, Whitman, Duncan, O’Hara and Spicer. For details of Peter’s schedule, to join his mailing list or to discuss mentoring, please write to him at brennos@hotmail.com (the autumn 2026 schedule includes courses on Lawrence’s poetry and on Post-American Poetry which have been designed to enable further exploration of the themes and authors discussed in the lecture).

PRESENTATION

Peter started autobiographically. He said that as a teenager he had been fascinated by post-War American poets who challenged existing models, in contrast to the contemporary English anti-modernist xenophobic poets known collectively as ‘the Movement’. Of the former, many of the most accomplished had been deeply and avowedly influenced by Lawrence. These poets acknowledged their debt to modernism, which they conceived of as an extension of Romanticism. Like Lawrence, they understood that the metaphysics of poetic composition could be inhibited by the analytical intellect. Indeed, according to Peter, the apotheosis of English Romanticism occurred with Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Jack Spicer. All four quoted and endorsed Lawrence in poetry and prose. Far from seeing Lawrence as a minor poet (as many in England felt was the case), they recognised him as an essential poetic pioneer. This fits with the facts that Lawrence had in his turn been open to the pioneering imagists Ezra Pound and H. D., and had perceived in America – despite its sinister mechanistic capitalism – possibilities which had died in England. It was therefore appropriately in New York that his incendiary essay ‘The Poetry of the Present’ (also known as ‘Verse Free and Unfree’) – written as Preface to New Poems (1920) – first appeared in book format.

To quote:

‘There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and infinite future. The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting gems of the before and after. In its quivering momentaneity it surpasses the crystalline, pearl-hard jewels, the poems of the eternities. Do not ask for the qualities of the unfading timeless gems. Ask for the whiteness which is the seethe of mud, ask for that incipient putrescence which is the skies falling, ask for the never-pausing, never-ceasing life itself. There must be mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without dénouement or close. There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the forever incalculable journey of creation: everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things.’

In this preface, Lawrence rightly pays tribute to Whitman, though he seems to misread his forebears such as Keats, like a child dismissing his parents. The essay also contains the phrase which Peter had used for his subtitle: ‘the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment’ – on fire because demonic expression emerges from the divine realm, and cold because the poet must exercise discipline and calm to allow this lightning to earth itself productively. ‘The Poetry of the Present’ was still regarded as pertinent and potent 53 years later, when it was – significantly – reprinted in The Poetics of the New American Poetry.

Lawrence’s contemporary William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was inspired by Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) to write a complementary collection, In the American Grain (1925). Lawrence reviewed the book positively, for which Williams wrote to thank him. Yet he received no reply; Lawrence at the time had a huge workload and poor health, and four years later he died. This provoked Williams to embark on his ‘Elegy’, which draws on Lawrence’s ‘Snake’, the late Greek/Mediterranean poems, and ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy’, as well as Whitman’s lament for Abraham Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, a foundational work of American poetry. The ‘Elegy’ expresses outrage at England’s rejection of her brave, brilliant son, who ‘passed/ unwanted from England.’

According with this unwantedness, this interaction between Lawrence and Williams passed unnoticed in England.  Even Leavis, who was to become Lawrence’s most powerful champion, dismissed him as a poet, not mentioning him once in New Bearings in English Poetry. In his Introduction to D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (with its assertively definitional subtitle) he wrongly separated Whitman from Lawrence, misrepresenting Lawrence’s essay on Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature in order to do so. The essay in fact contains much in affirmation of Whitman, as does ‘The Poetry of the Present’. To quote the first English edition of the former: ‘Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman… Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of unopened life, Whitman. Beyond him, none. His wide, strange camp at the end of the great high-road…’. Lawrence accepted Whitman’s conception of American democracy as a ‘true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road … A glad recognition of souls, and a gladder worship of great and greater souls, because they are the only riches.’ Lawrence certainly criticised Whitman’s passion for ‘merging’, but he also wrote a poem (‘Mana of the Sea’, 1929) which manifested precisely this (similarly, Williams both denounced merging and enacted it in ‘Seafarer’ (1948)). Overall Leavis, by rejecting many aspects of Romanticism, and denying its connection to modernism, involuntarily helped to justify the English aversion to the very modernism that he was at pains to promote, whilst also failing to recognise the stature of Lawrence’s poetry that was more readily perceived in America. Leavis’s judgment had a lasting effect on his poetry’s English reception. When in 1950 he re-issued New Bearings in English Poetry, he both expressed himself disappointed by the current English poetry, having acknowledged in the first edition that there might exist many great American poets of whom he was ignorant. Peter argued that these two facts were connected, and that there was far less excuse for such ignorance in 1950.

By the same token, the American poets who learned most from Lawrence have been under-appreciated in England. In America, Williams’s testimony to Lawrence’s poetry had a huge influence on the generation of poets that followed him. Charles Olson, born in 1910, was a bridge between the generation of Lawrence, Williams, Stevens, Pound and H. D. on the one hand, and the post-modern poets born in or around the 1920s on the other. He rejoiced in acquiring Lawrence’s watercolour of a pissing man, ‘Daffodils’, and repeatedly referred to ‘The Man Who Died’, Lawrencianly using the term ‘morality’ to evoke fidelity to the visceral self. In ‘D. H. Lawrence and the High Temptation of the Mind’ (1950) he praised Lawrence’s ability to prefer ‘the advantage of moral perceptions to those of the intellect’, and used the metaphor of the tortoise (‘the tortoise of feeling has to be allowed to make his race’) in a way that speaks to Lawrence’s tortoise poems.

In Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960) Allen flung down the adjective ‘new’ like a gauntlet, and gave particular prominence to those poets, including Olson, who paid tribute to Lawrence. This anthology in turn inspired Allen and Tallman’s volume The Poetics of the New American Poetry (1973), which contains essays by only two non-Americans: Lorca and Lawrence (‘The Poetry of the Present’). Through this volume Lawrence’s influence was amplified further. Robert Duncan (who came from a Theosophical family, was an inheritor of Blake, and like Lawrence had an intense, difficult relationship with his mother) said in 1985 (a propos the Allen and Tallman book): ‘I think Lawrence is a hidden integer in there, the estimate of Lawrence’. Frank O’Hara and Jack Spicer (respectively of the East Coast and West Coast, urbane and rebellious) don’t explicitly reference Lawrence as much as Olson and Duncan, but his significance is taken as read in the works of both. Moreover ‘The Ship of Death’ was of central importance to both men: we witness O’Hara reading it in ‘Joe’s Jacket’ (1959), while Spicer’s Billy the Kid sequence (1958) ends with an ironic reconfiguring of the central image of Lawrence’s poem.

Peter noted that Keith Sagar heroically championed Lawence’s poetry, making an obvious riposte to Leavis in the title of his 2008 book D. H. Lawrence: Poet. However, although this  work includes a 29-page bibliography of reviews and essays on the poems, he shows no interest in poets’ reception of Lawrence, which was where the deepest appreciation of them had been manifested. Bob Dylan (who may have known about Spicer and O’Hara through his connexion to Allen Ginsberg) understood this point, and intimated the limitations of academic criticism in his ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ (1965): ‘You’re very well read – It’s well known. // But something is happening here / And you don’t know what it is, / Do you?’ Dylan also echoed Lawrencian vocabulary and perception in ‘Too Much of Nothing’ (1967): ‘Send them all my salary / On the waters of oblivion’, and dedicated a performance of ‘Romance in Durango’ – which might be heard as echoing aspects of ‘Mornings in Mexico’ and The Plumed Serpent – explicitly to Lawrence. Peter suggested that Dylan’s approach to the composition and performance of his work chimes precisely with the principles Lawrence had advocated decades earlier in the ‘Poetry of the Present’ essay.

Peter concluded that what American writers had given Lawrence, Lawrence had returned ‘in spades’, leaving an impact on American poetry that was profound, widespread and ongoing.

DISCUSSION

There were two questions about where other writers fitted in. Nesrin Eruysal asked about H. D. Peter said that they had at first interacted profoundly, but then moved in different directions. H. D. was the single most important poet for Robert Duncan, who in the mid-1960s wrote The H. D. Book. Jim Phelps wondered why Jack Kerouac had not featured in Peter’s account, given that he was ‘the embodiment of the Lawrencian explosion in American literature’. Peter responded that he had focused on those poets whom he found the most accomplished, and that he responded to Kerouac principally as a prose writer. I understand that much of the discussion occurred long after I (Catherine Brown) had to leave.