‘Wild Turkeys’: some versions of America by D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence’s desire to go to the United States led in 1917-18 to his planning and then writing of the essays that were finally published as Studies in Classic American Literature (1923): all of them were conceived and written with ambivalence. He revised the essays for the last time in New Mexico in the autumn and early winter of 1922, and ‘Americanized’ them for his new American market. In particular, his essay on Walt Whitman now refused to allow the great writer to be an iconic figure. Lawrence’s satirical version of Whitman set out to undermine the seriousness with which Whitman took himself and with which he was generally taken. Lawrence was attacked for his ignorance of American writing, but he had set out to track the American obsession with power and death, satirically; he remained in an uneasy and finally unresolved relationship with American writing.