Creativity and Beliefs

ELT 37:3 1994 principles governing its creation, is meticulous and thorough in its annotation, and so far as I have tested it, remarkably free from casual error. Simon Gatrell _______________ University of Georgia Creativity and Beliefs Paul Poplawski. Promptings of Desire: Creativity and the Religious Impulse in the Works of D. H. Lawrence. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. xiv + 210pp. $49.95 PAUL POPLAWSKI points out, "We all think we know what creativity means and... [Lawrencians] especially think they know what creativity means." His painstaking exploration of the concept itself and its centrality to Lawrence's art and philosophy reveals the previously limited nature of our knowledge of both creativity and Lawrence. Poplawski presents Lawrence as a crusader. Though Lawrence's crusade was an artistic one in the service of creativity, he, like other crusaders, was compelled by religious fervor. The terminology here is factual, not metaphorical, as the author contends that for Lawrence creativity and religion are ultimately one. To explain this conclusion, Poplawski offers an evolving definition of creativity which provides insight into Lawrence's theme and method. The chapters in his book are steps in the construction of a rigorous argument. Some of these chapters put to use the already established framework of the complete body of work on Lawrence while others break entirely new ground. Poplawski is at his most interesting when presenting new information and most convincing when displaying mastery of the old. The old, best exemplified by F. R. Leavis, assumes but does not analyze the importance of the concept of creativity to Lawrence's work. Of course, it is difficult to analyze the importance of something without understanding what it is. Poplawski begins to remedy his oversight by researching the origins of the word itself. Etymological study uncovers a religious history for the word "create" that parallels Lawrence's instinctive understanding. Even definitions that narrowly define the term along elitist lines foreshadow the development of Lawrence's philosophy into paradoxical positions. The fact that the form of the word "creativity" is a twentieth-century construct merely suggests the relevance of its study to Lawrence and the study of Lawrence to twentiethcentury thought. While Lawrence's overriding creative concern remained with individ418 BOOK REVIEWS ual possibility for growth and fulfillment, he was not unaffected by the potential role of creativity in emerging social and political constructs. The merging with and the swervings from other ideological positions are a crucial element in his own definition of the "creative unconscious." Poplawski places Lawrencian thought against that of Freud, Jung, Russell, Marcuse, and Kristeva, thus providing a useful point of reference for further discussion of the creative principle in Lawrence's art and religion. Creativity, for Lawrence, defied any separation between life (the physical and the spiritual) and art because artistic creation itself is a kind of quickening. Poplawski moves as easily as Lawrence from the "creative" impulse to the "pro-creative" impulse, which for Lawrence seems to have been, in Steven's words, both "the idea and the thing itself." Put more mundanely by Poplawski, "sex was always for Lawrence primarily a religious phenomenon." This Lawrencian commonplace , now a proven assumption, allows creativity to offer insight into religion and the quest within the Lawrence canon where Poplawski's mastery of Lawrence scholarship is always employed with impressive results. Once again Poplawski's technique is first to state the obvious: "Lawrence's work is characterized by its biblical rhythms and allusions, and by its religious imagery and symbolism." Then, before clarifying the relationship between religion and creativity that he asserts exists, he traces and explains the development of Lawrence's religious consciousness . Here he relies heavily on A. Whigham Price's earlier work on the influence of Lawrence's early Congregationalist upbringing, though he does not ignore the more recent work of Graham Holderness who calls into question Price's interpretation. Instead he uses the debate to expose the ambiguity in Lawrence's religious reasoning. Lawrence's wish to privilege the vital human experience (e. g. work, sex) in his philosophy contradicts a belief in an impersonal cosmic process which renders individuality meaningless. This paradox is basic to Lawrence's "metaphysics of creativity." After such careful...