ABSTRACT
D. H. Lawrence’s interest in America raises the large and complex consideration that the new world, in both the European and the American imagination, has itself always had strongly primitivist associations. For all his ineradicable Englishness and his detestation of the modern United States, Lawrence was an adoptive American in his fascination with the ancient races and the great literature of America. Primitivism, is born of the interplay between the civilized self and the desire to reject or transform it. This interplay may take a positive or creative direction. In Lawrence, for example, there is a recreation within the civilized consciousness of very primary levels of feeling; a mingling of both to produce that spontaneity and emotional fullness so superbly embodied in his best works. In their different ways, then, both Henry Miller and Lawrence suggest the border area of primitivism.
