The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. He was amazingly prolific: a dozen novels, another dozen volumes of shorter fiction, many volumes of increasingly strong poetry that moved from the influence of Thomas Hardy to that of Walt Whitman. But that only begins to catalogue Lawrence's fecundity. He was an incisive literary critic, an intensely vivid travel writer, a polemicist who argued against Freud while getting Freud quite wrong, a dramatist, an incessant letter writer, and a painter. After reading him for more than seventy years, I value him most for two great novels: The Rainbow and Women in Love, which he had intended to be one long saga to be called The Sisters. Of equal importance are his shorter fictions, many of them novellas, and his poetry. Now, in 2018, Lawrence is no longer esteemed as a prophet or a spiritual guide. When I was young, many women and men of my generation were Lawrentians, but that vogue expired when fiercer feminisms arrived.

Lawrence invoked a living God: then I must know that still