Abbey L. Allen
Dartmouth College, US
Uprooting Nature and Ourselves: An Ecocritical Perspective of the Poetry of D.H. Lawrence
Perhaps the most significant of the Industrial Era's revolutions was the one in which humans transformed their understanding of themselves in the context of the natural world. Lawrence recognized that humans illusory physical separation from nature was creating a psychological separation as well; for Lawrence, one of the crises of the twentieth century was a matter of the human mind displaced from its natural body, of the modern conception of identity. Lawrence's loss of the landscape of his youth informed this awareness and ultimately impelled a lifetime quest to recreate a place in which the modern conception of identity could be redefined in its natural context.
In selected early poems, essays, and biographies, I am exploring the development of Lawrence's ideology from an ecopsychological perspective of childhood. I hope to give flesh to the idea that, unlike the majority of Westerners of his and our time, Lawrence the man and writer was inseparable from the natural world, and he felt it his calling to persuade fellow men to rediscover their lost roots and to psychologically reconnect with the earth, with home. In a letter to Edward Garnett in 1913, published in volume one of Letters, Lawrence wrote: I think I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people. The want is actually a psychological need to reconnect with nature. For Lawrence, this need manifested itself in the ecotopia-unattainable, the fantasy-memory of youth in thefields and forests of Eastwood.