SOURCE: "Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman," in PMLA, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 1, March, 1963, pp. 103-13.

In the following essay, Engelberg describes the symbolic narrative of The Rainbow as that of a modern interpretation of the novel of maturation.

I

Late in his life, in 1933, Yeats read Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love "with excitement," and found the love story of Lady Chatterley's Lover "noble." In Lawrence he found an ally "directed against modern abstraction"; and he considered that, with Joyce, Lawrence had "almost restored to us the Eastern simplicity." A hatred of Abstraction; a fearless plunge into the mire of human existence; an anti-intellectual stance (which was almost at times a pose); and a mythopoeic conception of art and life; these Yeats and Lawrence shared, whatever their differences—which were considerable. And what they shared accounts...