The digressive, prescient brilliance of DH Lawrence’s essays

These pieces by Lawrence represented the first glimpse of a more labile relationship between criticism and fiction, between the necessary restraints of academic discipline and the vagrant life of the mind. A fortnight earlier, in Colorado, I’d seen the Western Hostiles, which takes its epigraph from Lawrence’s essay on Fenimore Cooper: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” If Lawrence remains a great writer today that is due in no small part because his enduring freshness and force is found in the travel books, in poems that were scarcely even poems, and in the scatter of his essays.

Source: www.newstatesman.com