An anarchist strain runs through Lawrence’s immediate postwar writings, but epistemological idealism in its current manifestations in politics, union activism and educational policy is his real target in his essays of 1918–19 and his play Touch and Go (May 1920). In his poem ‘The Revolutionary’ and in the ‘Fruits’ sequence of poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers a way out of the idealist fog is plotted. Comparison of the two versions of these poems of September 1920, rewritten soon afterwards with idiomatic simplicity and arch comedy, exposes the mind’s capacity to interfere with, to sublimate, the body’s instinctive grasp of a deeper non-idealist world. Count Psanek, a revolutionary in his own way in ‘The Ladybird’ (novella, written December 1921), prosecutes the next of Lawrence’s performative encounters with big ideas stretched across broad intellectual terrain. Those stagings leave us suspended in the void between them, troubled by the undercutting, the ridicule, that the Lawrence protagonists typically attract from their partners and friends, even as their intellectual goal is kept stubbornly alive.