Background

David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was an English writer and poet from Nottinghamshire.

His father, a miner at Brinsley Colliery, is thought to have been barely literate, but his mother fostered in him a love of learning and encouraged him to read. He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and went on to study education at University College Nottingham, which at the time was in the city, before the University Park campus was built.

Best known for his novels, particularly Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he also published several books of poems, plus many short stories and essays. He was prolific, writing right up until his death in 1930.

His work explores themes of sexuality, vitality, emotion and the natural world and, having grown up in the shadow of the mining industry, he was particularly interested in the dehumanising effects of industrialisation.

His work was controversial, he pushed boundaries and broke taboos. Because of this – plus his affair and subsequent elopement with his former professor’s German wife Frieda – he experienced condemnation, censorship and persecution in the UK and spent much of his adult life in voluntary exile abroad.

Session one: the poems

Although most famous for his novels, Lawrence was first published as a poet. He wrote nearly 800 poems, most fairly short, and stark, covering themes such as nature, sex and outrage at the hypocrisy of the modern industrialised world.

Exercise 1: In this exercise we look at three of the poems:

• ‘Green’ which illustrates Lawrence’s use of colour and imagery to see the world in a different way (the sky was green wine held up in the sun)
• ‘Humming Bird’ – an imagined history of the hummingbird in which he imagines it being much bigger, like the dinosaurs
• ‘Piano’ – in which he looks back with nostalgia on his childhood, recalling his mother playing piano on Sunday evenings.

 

Here’s what you do:

• Read the three poems
• Think about the themes covered in each
• Note the emotion
• Consider the imagery and language used
• Pick one of the poems, or a line from one of them, and write your own piece inspired by it.

Exercise 2: we looked at Lawrence’s dialect poem, ‘The Collier’s Wife’ (And it helps if you have someone from Eastwood in the group to read it in the correct dialect!)

• Read the poem
• Think about someone who was influential in your own childhood
• Write a poem inspired by that person, in their voice, using dialect if you like

For the next session, covered in the next blog, I’ll be looking at some of the novels.

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