D.H. Lawrence and the Poetry of Humanimality

Abstract

If Lawrence called for a poetry of the present that surpasses “finished crystallisation” (CP 182), the advent of such poetry was for him a way to deconstruct anything “fixed, set, static” (ibid.) like the preconceived world-view of anthropomorphism he denounced in Wordsworth’s Peter Bell: “Sweet-Williamish at that! Anthropomorphized! Anthropomorphism, that allows nothing to call its soul its own, save Anthropos: and only a special brand, even of him!” (“…Love was Once a Little Boy,” Phoenix II, 449) This paper will focus on Lawrence’s relation to anthropocentrism that stifles the very ontology of nature and humanizes animals. With the publication of Birds, Beasts and Flowers and the prodigious fauna that peoples his poetic corpus, Lawrence rejected the human-animal antagonism to then impose his poetic celebration of animality that culminates in humanimality, the eco-ontological nexus between man and the animal realm.