It's an undifferentiated blur now, but if I stop to focus on my DH Lawrence, the Lawrence of the 60s, I can begin to discern the fuzzy but recognisable outline of a literary aesthetic that was both persuasive and, for Lawrence at least, coherent. Adolescents had worn khaki in the 1940s, and flannel in the 50s, but we would dress like clowns. We would celebrate Dionysus, and we would be free. We would, as Lawrence put it, "break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to form our utterance". We, by contrast, would feel the blood thunder in our veins, become spontaneous and vital and instinctual. For readers who had grown up with JM Barrie, CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E Nesbit and all the repressed masters of post-Victorian children's literature, Lawrence seemed to offer the most exhilarating liberation.
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