River of Dissolution

First published in 1969. This title concerns itself with the ambivalence of Lawrence’s attitude towards corruption. Clarke demonstrates that Lawrence’s attitude to ‘will’ and to sensational or disintegrative sex is much more equivocal than conceded. At the same time this is a study of Lawrence’s debt as a novelist to the English Romantic poets. A tradition of metaphor is traced from the second half of the eighteenth century, through the poetry of the major Romantics to the Decadents, and so to L