So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
(Piano, 9-12)
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to a coal-mining father he could sometimes despise and a mother whom he revered. Later Lawrence wrote about his life with them in Sons and Lovers. After his education, he taught at Eastwood School, and then in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, before obtaining a teaching certificate from Nottingham University College in 1908. He then became junior assistant master at Davidson Road School in Croydon until 1911, when he renounced teaching and determined to live as a writer. Capable of great and stormy loves, especially for his mother and his wife, his works focused candidly on sexual relationships. After breaking up with a succession of women, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in Sons and Lovers), Helen Corke, and his fiancee Louie Burrows, he eloped with a married woman, Frieda von Richthofen Weekley in 1912. They lived an itinerant life for the next eighteen years, visiting for a time Australia, Ceylon, Italy, Mexico, New Mexico (where he was eventually cremated and buried), and Sicily. They married July 13, 1914, and at his death she nursed him. Lawrence is best known as a novelist for works such as The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930). He also published volumes of short stories, plays, travel stretches, and critical books such as Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and Pornography and Obscenity (1929). His paintings were exhibited in London in 1929. After many years fighting tuberculosis, Lawrence died on March 2, 1930, in Vence, France.
Lawrence's novels, or his short stories, or even his 5,000 letters would have been enough, individually, to establish him as a great twentieth-century writer, but he also wrote astonishing poetry. It was a passion that charted his life. His complete verse, superbly edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, offers nearly 1,100 poems. Works like "Piano," the Tortoise poems, "Snake," "The Ship of Death," and "Wages" deserve the widest possible readership.
Lawrence's published books of poetry are
Essential books on Lawrence and his poetry include
Given name: David Herbert
Family name: Lawrence
Birth date: 11 September 1885
Death date: 2 March 1930
Nationality: English
Education
Beauvale Board School: 1891 to 1898
Nottingham High School: 1898 to 1901
University College, Nottingham: 1908
Literary movement: Imagist
Literary period: Modern
Occupations
Novelist
School-teacher
Residences
Eastwood, Nottinghamshire
New Mexico, United States
Zennor, Cornwall
London: 1908
Hermitage near Newbury, Berkshire: 1918 to 1918
Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derbysh: 1918 to 1919
Cause of death: Tuberculosis
Buried at: east of Taos, New Mexico