Promptings of Desire

Through his art, D. H. Lawrence exhorted people to recognize their potential for creative change and to energize it toward a more fulfilling mode of existence. Author Paul Poplawski seeks to define Lawrence's concept of creativity and explores its use as a central structuring principle of his ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic thought. Viewed in relation to his basic religious beliefs, the concept of creativity provides us with an integrated perspective on his art. Poplawski considers biographical elements of Lawrence's religious formation and traces the path of transmittal of these ideas into the early fiction and particularly The Rainbow. He then continues to demonstrate how religious views and aesthetic theory coalesce in the later works. He also engages critical dialogue by investigating counter-creative trends of elitism and sexism in the corpus.