Here’s a vigorous defense in the form of poetry by Tony Hoagland:

LAWRENCE

by Tony Hoagland

On two occasions in the past twelve months I have failed, when someone at a party spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,

a man who burned like an acetylene torch from one end to the other of his life. These individuals, whose relationship to literature is approximately that of a tree shredder

to stands of old-growth forest, these people leaned back in their chairs, bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish, and casually dropped his name

the way pygmies with their little poison spears strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant. “O Elephant,” they say, “you are not so big and brave today!”

It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors with a contempt they haven’t earned, and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people

don’t defend the great dead ones who have opened up the world before them. And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals, this is a fairly minor entry,

I resolve, if the occasion should recur, to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle of maggots condescending to a corpse,” or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

as to deserve to lift just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples to your arid psychobiographic theory-tainted lips.”

Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut between the spirit and the flesh, and punch someone in the face, because human beings haven’t come that far

in their effort to subdue the body, and we still walk around like zombies in our dying, burning world, able to do little more

than fight, and fuck, and crow, something Lawrence wrote about in such a manner as to make us seem magnificent.