Dictionary of Literary Influences
.pdfKoestler, Arthur
had no final reality. Klee frequently incorporated symbols and emblems into his work as well to introduce the viewer to deeper meanings beyond the apparent subject matter. This idea that visual art is simultaneously surface and symbol was espoused by Oscar Wilde in his Aesthetic Manifesto, a work that Klee read along with the author’s Man’s Soul under Socialism and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Archives
The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA89-A318.
Printed Sources
Grohmann, Will. Paul Klee (New York: George Braziller, 1962). Klee, Felix. Paul Klee (New York: George Braziller, 1962).
——— (ed.). The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).
Gregory L. Schnurr
KOESTLER, ARTHUR (1905–1983)
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest, the only child of assimilated Jews: a Hungarian father and Austrian mother. After scientific studies in Vienna and a kibbutz stay in Palestine, he became a roving journalist, foreign editor, and Communist propagandist. He survived Franco’s jails (1937), internment in France (1939–40), the French Foreign Legion (1940), and the British Pioneer Corps (1941–42), becoming a British national after the war but remaining a citizen of the world. With his third wife he committed suicide, reaffirming private dignity and individual liberties, the values he had championed for much of his life.
The turning point in Koestler’s development was his joining the Communist Party on December 31, 1931. By the time he left the Party in 1938, the unfinished debate over “noble ends and ignoble means,” between morality and expediency, was yielding to his quest for an understanding of individual psychology beyond collective rhetoric and abstract ideologies. Koestler turned increasingly inward, to Henri Bergson, Carl Jung, and especially Sigmund Freud, whom he finally met with awe in London in autumn 1938 but from whom he would distance himself in subsequent works. “Freud or Marx?” asked George Orwell in reviewing Koestler, who acknowledged these two strands to his development. The binary opposition between chronic indignation (Marxism, Zionism, anti-Fascism) and oceanic relativism (Freudianism, mysticism, creativity) is reflected in the antithetical titles of his many writings, in which he rejects both Communism and psychoanalysis. Versed in each but dismissive of both, Koestler long flogged these same “dead horses.” He thrived on reconciling opposites, pursuing the impossible synthesis, representing differences as contraries.
Koestler’s personal reading tastes began with Knut Hamsun, from whom he and Ernest Hemingway learned conciseness. He considered Hemingway the greatest writer of the twentieth century. The “heroes of [his] youth” were “Darwin and Spencer, Kepler, Newton, and Mach; Edison, Hertz and Marconi.” His “Bible” was a nineteenth-century classic, Ernst Haeckel’s Mysteries of the Universe, of which one
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riddle remained unresolved: free will. To two “knowing ones” he remained devoted until their deaths: Vladimir Jabotinsky, Zionist, and Willy Muenzenberg, Communist (Koestler 1952, 50–55). Among more literary figures, he “adored Dostoyevsky,” particularly Crime and Punishment and The Possessed: Raskolnikov is the starting point and foil to Koestler’s characters in grappling with free will. As a youth he also “loved Oscar Wilde” and “admired Stendhal.” After the modern Hungarian poet Endre Ady he favored “Rilke, Goethe, Heine, Hölderlin, and Byron, approximately in that order.” (Hölderlin was added to this list in 1975.) In his mature years Koestler’s “Pantheon became overpopulated” (Koestler 1975, 47–50). How to encompass the immense territory of this polyglot and polymath’s readings? The diversity of critics addressing his work highlights its underpinnings in literature, politics, philosophy, science, and beyond. For Insight and Outlook the publisher reported Koestler had invested five years in studying biology, neurology, and psychology; he himself confirmed that his research for The Gladiators had been equally comprehensive. For the unfinished third volume of his autobiography, Cynthia Koestler lists a sampling of books he ordered almost weekly in 1950, spanning volumes of Freud’s complete works alongside Hemingway, Ignazio Silone, and Stephen Spender, all representing the literature of antifascism. In that generation which was his own, he particularly respected George Orwell’s model of moral integrity and artistic professionalism: “the only writer of genius among the littérateurs of social revolt between the wars” (Koestler 1980, 269). When pressed in an interview to identify influences (not imitation but “feeding and digesting”), he cited Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, and the early Thornton Wilder (Rosner and Abt 1970, 144). In his final interview he was asked about imaginative writers important to him but replied, “No comment. That’s list-making” (“Arthur Koestler” 1984, 195).
Archives
Edinburgh University: manuscripts and papers.
Printed Sources
“Arthur Koestler.” The Paris Review 92 (1984), 183–201.
Cesarani, David. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (New York: Free Press, 1998). Crossman, Richard (ed.). The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949).
Day, Frank. Arthur Koestler: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1987). Hamilton, Iain. Koestler: A Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 1982).
The Koestler Archive in Edinburgh University Library: A Checklist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Library, 1987).
Koestler, Arthur. Arrow in the Blue (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
———.Bricks to Babel (New York: Random, 1980).
———.The Invisible Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1954).
———.“Lectures de jeunesse.” In Arthur Koestler, Pierre Debray-Ritzen (ed.), (Paris: L’Herne, 1975), 47–50.
Koestler, Arthur, and Cynthia Koestler. Stranger on the Square (New York: Random, 1984). Orwell, George. “Freud or Marx?” Manchester Evening News, Dec. 9, 1943, 2.
Rosner, Stanley, and Lawrence E. Abt (eds.). The Creative Experience (New York: Grossman, 1970), 131–53.
Roy Rosenstein
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KOHL, HELMUT (1930– )
Helmut Kohl, known as the “Chancellor of Unity” for his role in Germany’s 1989–90 reunification and as the Federal Republic of Germany’s sixth chancellor (1982–98), grew up in a staunchly Catholic family in Ludwigshafen. After completing high school in 1950, Kohl’s university studies focused first on law at Frankfurt am Main and then history at Heidelberg. Completed in 1958, Kohl’s doctorate focused on the revival of political life in post-1945 western Germany.
Kohl identified early with Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Rhineland-Pfalz. Inspired by the CDU’s conservative vision and its leadership, Kohl rose quickly within the CDU, serving on its various regional and national committees, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1969 Kohl succeeded Peter Altmeier as minister-president of Rhineland-Pfalz. As minister-president (1969–76), Kohl held to policies emphasizing the modernization of RhinelandPfalz, its educational system, and centralized planning within the state. Paralleling his rise in state politics, Kohl’s image as a national leader rose. Under Kohl’s increasing leadership, CDU embraced principles balancing the needs of a competitive market with a moral responsibility to sustain a social welfare system. Kohl succeeded Helmut Schmid as chancellor in October 1982 while the CDU surged ahead in subsequent elections. While confronted with an economy in decline, Kohl’s foreign policy revitalized his political career. After East Germany’s collapse in late 1989, Kohl sought to realize the CDU’s long-term objective of German reunification. In March 1990, East Germans voted into office a collection of prounification political parties, and Kohl’s popularity rose accordingly, keeping him in office for another eight years. Nevertheless, Kohl’s domestic policies failed to remedy the ailing economy, growing unemployment, and outbursts of xenophobia. Kohl’s support for a long-term policy leading to Europe’s political unification, as outlined in the Maastricht Treaty, did not satisfy the electorate at a time of economic decline. Kohl’s critics emphasized an apparent lack of intellectual depth and emphasis upon internal political machinations as an explanation for his political longevity. In 1998, Gerhard Schröder succeeded Kohl as German chancellor.
Helmut Kohl’s clearest contribution to German culture is in architecture. Visible evidence of Kohl’s inclination for modernism and sense of history can be gleaned from many of the federal structures in both Bonn and Berlin dating back to his days as chancellor. Bonn’s Art Museum (Kunstmuseum) and Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Berlin’s Kulturforum, the new chancellery, and the restructured Reichstag are particularly stunning examples of the merger of these themes.
Helmut Kohl’s earthy charisma, large stature, and simple style often made him a target his critics could not resist. Overall, his contributions to German cultural life moved along several paths. Kohl admired Konrad Adenauer and shared with him a belief in the importance of a German cultural heritage. While less enthusiastic than Adenauer about classical literature, Kohl seemed to agree with Adenauer’s distaste for socially critical authors, such as Günther Grass. Of those works he favored, Kohl’s memoirs suggest that he preferred contemporary political figures to classical authors. Like Adenauer, Kohl believed Adolf Hitler’s rise represented a departure from Germany’s Christian heritage and constituted a break with its traditional cultural ties with its neighbors. Nevertheless, Kohl did not believe that past events should determine the future cultural growth of his fellow Germans.
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Archives
Zwischenarchiv des Bundesarchivs, Hangelar. Temporary location for documents being transferred to the national archives, but still in the formal posession of the issuing ministries.
Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. National Archival holdings.
Bundeskanzleramt, Bonn. Papers held by the Office of the Federal Chancellor.
Archive fur Christlich-Demokratische Politik, Sankt Augustin. Official archive of the Christian Democratic Union.
Buro des Bundesvorsitzenden der CDU, Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, Bonn.
Privatarchive und Dokumentensammlung Werner Weidenfelds, Munich. Documents used by Karl-Rudolf Korte to write on the German unification process. Holdings of personal advisors to Kohl and not generally accessible to researchers.
Printed Sources
Clemens, Clay, and William E. Paterson (eds.). The Kohl Chancellorship, special issue of German Politics 7, 1 (April 1998).
Geschichte der deutschen Einheit in 4 Bänden (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1998–99). Kohl, Helmut. Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit (Berlin: Ullstein, 1996).
Maser, Werner. Helmut Kohl: Der Deutsche Kanzler (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1990). Muenchler, Guenter, and Klaus Hofmann. Helmut Kohl: Kanzler der Einheit (Bonn: Presse-
und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, 1992).
David A. Meier
KUNDERA, MILAN (1929– )
Kundera Milan was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His father was a concert pianist and musicologist. Kundera himself studied music theory at Charles University in Prague as well as film at the Academy of Performing Arts. In 1947 he joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party like many Czech students of the time. However, due to his opposition to socialist realism, Kundera was expelled from the Party in 1950. Reinstated in 1956, Kundera gained a teaching position in the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, where his students included Milosˇ Forman and Jirˇí Menzel, both of whom later won Academy Awards. Kundera established himself as one of the most important literary figures in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s, publishing a play and two collections of short stories before his first novel, The Joke (1967). Kundera was an avid supporter of the political reforms of Alexander Dubcˇek, and he was cast into official disfavor following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. He emigrated to France in 1975, taking a teaching position at the University of Rennes. In 1980 he became a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. After his emigration, Kundera published the novels that gained him acclaim as one of the most important European writers of the late twentieth century: The Farewell Party (1976), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and
Immortality (1990). He also has written a play, Jacques and His Master (written in Czech in 1971, first performed in French in 1981), and two collections of essays, The Art of the Novel (1986) and Testaments Betrayed (1995). His essay collections and his two novellas, Slowness (1995) and Identity (1996), were written originally in French rather than his native Czech.
Kundera’s primary concern with existence in a world without God and the digressions he takes in his novels (often halting the narrative to comment to the
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reader on his characters or historical events) have earned him the label of “philosophical” author. But, just as he eschewed the label of “dissident,” so does Kundera reject the idea that he is a philosophical writer. Instead, he sees himself as a novelist, someone who explores questions of existence through the actions of imaginary characters. According to Kundera, the novel is the defining art form of the modern era in that it allows writers and readers to investigate various facets of existence with humor, moral ambiguity, and the search for knowledge as the sole guiding principle. In his essay collections, Kundera describes a history of the novel, offering a survey of some of his literary influences: principal among them are Cervantes, Gustave Flaubert, and especially Marcel Proust and James Joyce, who used the novel to meditate upon time and consciousness. Kundera also highlights four Central Europeans whom he regards as the defining “post-Proustian” novelists: Franz Kafka, Austrian novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, and Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. These writers plumbed the central questions of an existence constricted by forces that are “impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, and inescapable,” in particular the dilemma of trying to control one’s own life when confronted by the irrationality of history. Another important influence on Kundera’s fiction, in terms of style and structure, is classical music. Critics have pointed to the musical structure of Kundera’s most famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with its recurrence of motifs, the development of variations upon themes, and the counterpunctual layering of narratives. Kundera seemingly acknowledges this structuring with his references to Beethoven’s final quartet and its musical motif of “Es muss sein.”
Archives
ˇ
Josef Skvorecky´ Collection, Hoover Institution of War, Peace, and Revolution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. Correspondence between Kundera and his North American
ˇ
publisher, Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky´.
Printed Sources
Banerjee, Maria Neˇmcová. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel, Linda Asher (trans.), (New York: Grove, 1988).
———. Testaments Betrayed, Linda Asher (trans.), (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). Misurella, Fred. Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs (Columbia: Uni-
versity of South Carolina Press, 1993).
Petro, Peter (ed.). Critical Essays on Milan Kundera (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999).
Bruce R. Berglund
KUROSAWA, AKIRA (1910–1998)
Akira Kurosawa was born in the Omori district of Tokyo at the end of Japan’s Meiji period. He attended Morimura Gakuen School, Kuroda Primary School, and Keika Middle School, where he excelled in the arts, kendo, and calligraphy. At the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts, Kurosawa trained formally as a painter and joined the Proletarian Artists League. He voiced his political concerns by contributing articles to many socialist publications throughout the early 1930s. Kurosawa was hired at Tokyo’s Photo Chemical Laboratory in 1935 and apprenticed with renowned filmmaker Kajiro Yamamoto, studying all aspects of movie-making from set construc-
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tion to editing. Kurosawa filmed his first work, Sanshiro Sugata, in 1943, and within a decade was recognized as Japan’s foremost director. His films reflected the social conflicts inherent in postwar Japanese society and the struggle to maintain an Eastern identity in the wake of rising Western social values. Kurosawa’s 1951 film Roshomon won first prize at the Venice Film Festival and served as a gateway to introducing his work to Western audiences. The classics The Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and Akahije (1965) demonstrate Kurosawa’s advanced knowledge of on-screen choreography and his ingenious use of the anamorphic frame and multicamera filming. Kurosawa’s films often combined long tracking shots with spectacular action scenes, slow-motion sequences, and fast-paced editing. Despite a period of desperation that included a suicide attempt, Kurosawa produced epic films into his eighth decade. His final full-length motion pictures Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985) continued to emphasize the dignity and worth of the individual.
In his youth, Kurosawa’s father would frequently take him to view the storytellers who pantomimed their tales in the public halls around Kagurazaka. As such, the young director learned to express narrative visually as well as through written language. Kurosawa spent his formative years studying the works of master painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas in the heavily discounted art books of the Japanese depression era. Utilizing the theories of Western impressionist painters and Japanese printmakers such as Hokusai, Kurosawa developed a new way of establishing interesting arrangements of elements on film by emphasizing planar composition. Often, in the manner of a cubist painter, Kurosawa would treat the object caught on film as something to be dissected or broken down visually into a number of separate segments for analysis. His love of epic and dramatic tales drew him to Russian literature, where he perused such works as Ivan Turgenev’s
The Rendezvous, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.
Like Dostoyevsky, Kurosawa frequently used children as emblems of vulnerability in his work, and many of his darker cinematographic moments reflect the Russian novelist’s complex written portrayals of spiritual and physical poverty. Kurosawa also read the works of the popular Japanese novelists Natsume Soseki, Mori Ogai, and Kunikida Doppo, as well as Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book from the middle of the Heian period. He was a student of the precepts of traditional Japanese Noh drama as espoused by the medieval theorist Ze-ami in his treatise, Kadensho. Kurosawa fused these established notions of performance with the theories of modern artists and the techniques of cinematographers such as Sergei Eisenstein and John Ford to produce his truly unique and original, moving works of art.
Archives
The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections.
Printed Sources
Boch, Audie E. (ed.). Akira Kurosawa: Something Like an Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
Prince, Stephen. The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Gregory L. Schnurr
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LAMPEDUSA, DUKE OF PALMA AND PRINCE OF
See Tomasi, Giuseppe.
LANG, FRITZ (1890–1976)
Born in Vienna on December 5, 1890, to Anton Lang, architect, and a converted Jewish mother named Paula Schlesinger, Fritz Lang received a Catholic education that he qualified “puritanist.” He had an older brother only, Adolf Lang, born in 1884, of whom he never spoke. The young Fritz Lang went to a Viennese Catholic high school, the K. und K. Staatsrealschule, from 1901. In 1913, at 22, he traveled through Europe and spent some time in Paris, where he studied painting at the École de peinture Maurice Denis and at the Académie Julien. He had to go back to Vienna in 1914 as World War I began. Lang wrote his first scripts in 1917 and became a film director in 1919 in Berlin. He made his most famous masterpieces during the 1920’s: Der Mude Tod (Destiny, 1920), Dr Mabuse (1922), Sieg fried (Die Nibelungen, 1924), Metropolis (1927), and M (1931). Lang left his wife and Nazi Germany for France in 1933. The German director made most of his films in Hollywood, from 1935 to 1957. In 1963, the director played (in French) his own character in Jean-Luc Godard’s feature film, Le Mépris (Contempt). Lang’s influence is unique in film history. Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, François Truffaut, and JeanLuc Godard all owe something to the German master. American directors Ford Beebe and Robert Hill copied many scenes from Metropolis in their 1938 Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, as did Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1983). His 1929 Woman on the Moon was the first film to include a countdown, a suspense strategy invented by Lang himself. Even Madonna’s videoclip “Express Yourself” is a pastiche of a scene from Lang’s Metropolis.
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Fritz Lang grew up in a bourgeois family, where he read books by Jules Verne, Willi Gail, Kurd Lasswitz, and Hans Dominik. When he was at the Realschule, Lang also learned French and English and discovered authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Schiller, Johann von Goethe, William Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine, and playwright Hans Sachs. His film classic Metropolis combines numerous uncredited influences from French novelist Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future to Georg Kaiser’s play Coral. From 1920 until 1933, Lang co-wrote 10 German films with his wife Thea von Harbou, who also wrote novels and scripts (without her husband) for influential directors such as F. W. Murnau (four films between 1922 and 1924, including Phantom) and Arthur von Gerlash (Zur Chronik von Grieshuus, 1925). After adapting Liliom, a play by Ferenc Molnar, in 1934, Lang left Paris for the United States. The next step was Hollywood, and after many projects that didn’t work, Lang released his first American masterpiece, Fury, in 1936. In the next three decades spent in Hollywood, Lang directed films in many genres: dramas (You Only Live Once, 1937), anti-Nazi films (Hangmen Also Die, co-written with Bertolt Brecht in 1943; Ministry of Fear,
1944) and even westerns, among the best in film history, such as The Return of Frank James (1940), Western Union (1941), and Rancho Notorious (1952). To explain his fascination with the American West, Lang admits he read Karl May’s numerous stories about Indians and cowboys while he was a teenager. Lang also did two remakes (Scarlet Street, 1945, and Human Desire, 1954) of Jean Renoir’s movies, of which he wasn’t very proud. Lang’s last film, a fantastic thriller titled The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, was shot in Western Germany in 1960. For Lang, it was the third adaptation of Luxembourgois novelist Norbert Jacques’s 1922 story about the mysterious Dr. Mabuse.
Archives
Stiftung Deutsche Kinematek, Berlin, Germany. Films, photos, personal papers, and the Lang–Von Harbou divorce records.
Fritz Lang Archives, Cinémathèque française, Paris, France. Photos, miscellaneous correspondence.
Paramount Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, Beverly Hills, California. Photos, posters.
The Fritz Lang Files, The Cinema-Television Library and Archives of the Performing Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. The most important files about Lang, with personal and professional papers, correspondence, diaries, film scripts.
Printed Works
Elsaesser, Thomas. Metropolis (University of California Press, 2000).
Jacobsen, Wolfgang, Cornelius Schnauber, and Rolf Aurich (eds.). Fritz Lang: His Life and Work. Photographs and Documents ( Jovis Verlags und Projektburo, 2001).
Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.). Fritz Lang: A Guide to References Resources (New York: Macmillan, 1981).
McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Yves Laberge
LAWRENCE, DAVID HERBERT (1885–1930)
D. H. Lawrence was born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. Lawrence was raised a Congregationalist, and although he eventually broke from the Congregational
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chapel around 1907, its emphasis on the Bible and revelation, freedom, and independent self-governance was a formative influence. Lawrence studied on scholarship at Nottingham High School (1898–1901) but left after three years. In 1906, after he placed in the first division of the King’s Scholarship exam, he began to study at Nottingham University College for a teacher’s certificate and qualified for such in 1908. In 1911 illness forced Lawrence to stop teaching. In May 1912 Lawrence traveled with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), wife of a University of Nottingham professor, to Germany and Italy and thus began a nomadic life. Any assessment of Lawrence’s work on the development of Western culture in the twentieth century would consider his exploration of the volatility of essential human emotions and his examination of the paramount importance of humankind’s primal relation to cosmic nature.
Some key influences on Lawrence are mentioned in one of his early stories, “A Modern Lover” (1909–10). Of the sources cited, those of note include Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, and Henrik Ibsen. In some cases Lawrence was impressed by particular works, such as Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë; The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot; Modern Love (1862), a long poem by George Meredith; Anna Karenina (1873–77) by Lev Tolstoy; Pragmatism (1907) by William James. Lawrence also admired the work of Ivan Turgenev.
Lawrence benefited from Meredith’s and Eliot’s close observation of nature and critical examination of the relationship between men and women. Foremost, however, is Thomas Hardy, without question a significant influence on Lawrence, who wrote Study of Thomas Hardy (composed 1914; published entirely 1935). Nature, natural forces, the extent of any one person’s freedom and free will are key themes in Hardy and in Lawrence. The German metaphysical philosopher of pessimism and will, Arthur Schopenhauer, had influenced Hardy. Lawrence read (and annotated) a translated, redacted version of some of Schopenhauer’s essays and was deeply affected (see Roberts and Poplawski 2001).
In 1915, Lawrence read about the early Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and began to visualize more fully his belief of fundamental principles operating in the cosmic order, especially the notions of duality and polar opposites, ideas already rooted in him from the German philosophers. From his study of Hardy, and his reading of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Carlyle, and William James, Lawrence developed his thinking on the exceptional individual struggling to make meaning in a confused and threatening world. In 1918 Lawrence read On the Psycholog y of the Unconscious (1917) by Carl Gustav Jung, a reader of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who emphasized that all human minds share vast primordial contexts.
As a major poet, Lawrence’s early, fundamental influences are Meredith and Hardy. More extensive influences include the prophetic style of William Blake and the autobiographical nature meditations of William Wordsworth. Walt Whitman is the most complex and enduring influence on Lawrence’s poetry. Around 1914, Lawrence was captivated by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his ideas of futurism.
Archives
The University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University Park, Nottingham, England: manuscripts, literary papers, correspondence, photographs, artistic works, early biographical holdings, miscellanea, George Lazarus manuscript bequest.
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