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Lawrence Durrell’s Poetry

A Rift in the Fabric of the World

Isabelle Keller-Privat

This book 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 to his novels and residence books, which he kept writing at the same time. 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 including T. S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller, and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this book 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 Durrell that has not yet been broached 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-forth 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.”

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 338 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-68393-062-4 • Hardback • April 2019 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-68393-064-8 • Paperback • April 2023 • $42.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-68393-063-1 • eBook • April 2019 • $40.50 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry, Literary Criticism / European / Eastern, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century

Lawrence Durrell’s Poetry

A Rift in the Fabric of the World

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

This book 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 to his novels and residence books, which he kept writing at the same time. 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 including T. S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller, and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this book 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 Durrell that has not yet been broached 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-forth 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.”

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 338 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-68393-062-4 • Hardback • April 2019 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-68393-064-8 • Paperback • April 2023 • $42.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-68393-063-1 • eBook • April 2019 • $40.50 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry, Literary Criticism / European / Eastern, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century

Author

Isabelle Keller-Privat is senior lecturer, president of the International Lawrence Durrell Society, and co-director of the research team “Lieux Communs / Common Places” for the CAS Research Centre at the University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Private Country: The Poet’s Secret Cartography

Chapter 2. Cities, Plains and People: Lands of Exile and Introspection

Chapter 3. On Seeming to Presume: The Dream of a Secret Belonging

Chapter 4. “Dreams bursting at the seams to die”: The Tree of Idleness, The Mauled Dream

Chapter 5. The Ikons: Greece in the Mind’s Eye

Chapter 6. The Red Limbo Lingo: “Thus words in music drown”

Chapter 7. Vega: The Star of Poetry

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Lawrence Durrell’s Poetry

A Rift in the Fabric of the World

Isabelle Keller-Privat

Lawrence Durrell’s Poetry

A Rift in the Fabric of the World

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