This essay offers the first in-depth analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s entire poetic opus, from his early collections in the 1940s up to his last one published in 1973. Thirty years of Durrellian poetry are brought together in order to unveil the genesis of Durrell’s writing, both poetic and fictional, drawing links with his novels and residence books which he kept writing at the same time. Lawrence Durrell thus appears as first and foremost one of the greatest Late Modernist poets whose literary and epistemological investigations are to be understood in the light of a worldwide network of literary brotherhoods involving T.S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this essay shows why Durrell must also be read as the heir to the greatest English Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth) as well as to the French Symbolists and Modernists (from Baudelaire, to Nerval, Valéry and Cendrars). This comparative approach opens up a brand new perspective on Lawrence Durrell that has not been broached yet by North American and English scholarship. The symbolic patterns, the stylistic ploys and the aesthetic and philosophic tenets that characterize Durrell’s poetics account for the necessary back and fro reading that connects prose and poetry, the fictional and the lyrical, the descriptive and the abstract. Poetry excerpts, extracts from his residence books, novels and essays highlight not only Durrell’s complex literary strategies but also the ontological quest of a writer who, although never at home with the world he lived in, strove to create a life-world, what semiologists call the “umwelt”. This constitutive reality is the one that emerges within the clefts and cracks of the world, it is made of the barely legible signs that twinkle in the dark and that testify to the artist’s ability to create a world out of the present material chaos.
