Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Del Ivan Janik

Critical Essay by Del Ivan Janik

SOURCE: Janik, Del Ivan. “Toward ‘Thingness’: Cézanne's Painting and Lawrence's Poetry.” Twentieth Century Literature 19, no. 2 (April 1973): 119-28.

In the following essay, Janik asserts that two of Lawrence's essays focusing on the paintings of Paul Cézanne can also be read as descriptions of Lawrence's poetic development.

Two essays that reveal D. H. Lawrence's interest in and admiration for the paintings of Paul Cézanne deserve attention as expressions of Lawrence's own artistic problem, and the manner in which he solved it in the realm of poetry. “Art and Morality,” published in 1925, and the “Introduction to These Paintings” that Lawrence wrote for the 1929 edition of his own paintings both describe the special intuitive consciousness that Lawrence saw revealed in Cézanne's work, and provide an insight into what Lawence himself had been attempting to achieve in the medium of poetry.¹ Even more than Lawrence's Etruscan Places, which Christopher Hassall...
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