Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence frames artistic and moral independence as an act of hostility, not gratitude, which is exactly the provocation. “Immediate predecessors” isn’t the distant canon you can safely revere; it’s the still-warm generation whose habits are embedded in your schooling, your taste, your sense of what counts as “serious.” Their authority feels natural because it’s recent, institutionalized, and socially enforced. To get free, Lawrence suggests, you need an emotional jolt strong enough to break the spell. “Hate” is the accelerant: a deliberately ugly word for a process that’s often prettified as influence, mentorship, or tradition.

The subtext is psychological as much as literary. Lawrence is talking about the Oedipal drama of culture: you don’t become yourself by politely negotiating with the parent generation; you become yourself by refusing them, exaggerating their faults, turning their certainties into suffocation. Hatred here is less about malice than about clarity. It’s the permission to see your forebears as contingent, fallible, provincial - not as the weather.

Context sharpens the blade. Lawrence wrote in the shadow of Victorian and Edwardian moral authority, with its prudery, industrial pieties, and social scripts, and he watched modernity wrench old forms loose. Modernism’s breakthrough wasn’t just new technique; it was a break in obedience. The line captures the uncomfortable truth that revolutions in art (and in life) often begin as personal vendettas against the most recent “normal.” Lawrence isn’t prescribing cruelty so much as naming the dirty engine of renewal: to make room for a new voice, you sometimes have to declare the old one intolerable.