Abstract
Sandra Gilbert refers to the preface to Harry Crosby's Chariot of the Sun, which Lawrence wrote as his most important attempt at a general definition of poetry, saying that‘As a poetic theorist...Lawrence is a Romantic in modern dress’(Acts of Attention, 1972). H. A. Laird elaborately reconsiders Gilbert's reference from the modernist view of ‘defamiliarization’(Self and Sequence, 1988). Among other critics, Garrett Stewart writes an essay on the language of Lawrence:‘[His] best abstract diction is finally an indictment of evacuated categorical language’(‘Lawrence, “Being, ”and the Allotropic Style, ’1976). John Presley, in terms of‘foregrounding, ’characterizes his private linguistics as‘bare language, with the resources of everyday language aesthetically and purposefully distorted’(‘D. H. Lawrence and the Resources of Poetry, ’1979).
This essay is an attempt to make it evident, from the angle of defamiliarization and foregrounding, that Lawrence has more linguistic sensibility than he has been credited with and that his poetry is not only Romantic but also Modern.
