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Abstract

This paper analyses the critical perspective which the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell develops in his study Key to Modern Poetry. Based on the framework of the lectures he wrote for the British Council in Argentina in 1948, this collection of essays was pub- lished, thanks to the help of his poet friend John Gawsworth, in 1952. Although Durrell’s critical outlook seeps throughout his entire opus, Key to Modern Poetry, which has so far been ignored by scholars, offers the most illuminating viewpoint on the writer’s delicate relation- ship with critical discourse. Through his reading of the great modernists, Lawrence Durrell places himself in the long chain of poets and thinkers and suggests the underlying link be- tween his critical texts and the deeply self-referential texture of his fiction and poetry. Thus, he appears as a writer standing in the margins and who, from the displaced, disquieting perspective of the poet-critic, questions both the nature of poetry and the critic’s posture and language. The critic’s imperatives remind the reader of the poet’s vital desire to circum- scribe and never defile, to unfold the full potency of a vision unchained from any jargon.

In between reading and writing, reflexion and enunciation, Lawrence Durrell elaborates a complex relationship to metatextual thinking and poetic practice.

Résumé

Cette étude interroge la réflexion critique que le romancier et poète Lawrence Dur- rell mène dans son ouvrage Key to Modern Poetry, qui reprend la trame des conférences qu’il donna en 1948 sur la poésie pour le British Council en Argentine et qui fut publié en 1952.

Bien que cette réflexion imprègne toute son œuvre, c’est dans cet ouvrage, encore jamais étudié jusqu’ici, et qui fut mis en forme par son ami, le poète John Gawsworth, que la déli- cate position de l’écrivain face au discours critique est la plus saisissante. Lawrence Durrell, en passant par le détour de la lecture des grands poètes modernistes, s’inscrit dans la chaîne des poètes et laisse deviner les liens entre ses écrits critiques et la nature profondément auto-référentielle de sa fiction et de sa poésie. Ce faisant, il apparaît comme cet écrivain des marges, qui, depuis la perspective déplacée du critique-poète, questionne tant la nature de la poésie que la posture et le langage critique. Le lecteur reconnaît dans les exigences du critique celles du poète : comment circonscrire sans déflorer ? Comment déployer la force d’une vision sans la lourdeur du jargon ? C’est dans cet écart, entre lecture et écriture, entre méditation et parole, que s’élabore le rapport complexe de Lawrence Durrell à la réflexion métatextuelle et à la pratique poétique.

Isabelle K

eller

-P

rivat

Poetry at the risk of criticism in Key to Modern Poetry by Lawrence Durrell

To refer to this article:

Isabelle Keller-Privat, “Poetry at the risk of criticism in Key to Modern Poetry by Lawrence Durrell”, in Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 15, “The Risks

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Geneviève Fabry (UCL) Anke Gilleir (KU Leuven) Agnès Guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de GraeF (Ku leuven) Jan herman (KU Leuven) Guido latré (UCL) Nadia lie (KU Leuven)

Michel liSSe (FNRS – UCL) Anneleen maSSchelein (KU Leuven) Christophe meurée (FNRS – UCL) Reine meylaertS (KU Leuven) Stéphanie vanaSten (FNRS – UCL) Bart vanden boSche (KU Leuven) Marc van vaecK (KU Leuven)

Olivier ammour-mayeur (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -–

Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ingo berenSmeyer (Universität Giessen)

Lars bernaertS (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith bincKeS (Worcester College – Oxford)

Philiep boSSier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bruera (Università di Torino)

Àlvaro ceballoS viro (Université de Liège) Christian chelebourG (Université de Lorraine) Edoardo coStadura (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola creiGhton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. decKer (Oklahoma State University) Ben de bruyn (Maastricht University)

Dirk delabaStita (Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix – Namur)

Michel delville (Université de Liège)

César dominGuez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella

& King’s College)

Gillis dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute heidmann (Université de Lausanne)

Klaus H. KieFer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael Kolhauer (Université de Savoie)

Isabelle KrzywKowSKi (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Sofiane laGhouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François lecercle (Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV) Ilse loGie (Universiteit Gent)

Marc mauFort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina morin (University of Limerick) Miguel norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa oberhuber (Université de Montréal)

Jan ooSterholt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton) Pieter VerStraeten ((Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

ConseilderédaCtion – redaCtieraad

David martenS (KU Leuven & UCL) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur

Matthieu SerGier (UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis), Laurence van nuijS (FWO – KU Leuven), Guillaume Willem (KU Leuven) – Secrétaires de rédaction - Redactiesecretarissen

Elke d’hoKer (KU Leuven)

Lieven d’hulSt (KU Leuven – Kortrijk) Hubert roland (FNRS – UCL)

Myriam watthee-delmotte (FNRS – UCL)

Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331

B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)

ComitésCientifique – WetensChaPPelijKComité

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P

oetry at the risK of CritiCism

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Nothing is lost, sweet self Nothing is ever lost.

The unspoken word

Is not exhausted but can be heard.

Music that stains the silence remains.

O! echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!1

Lawrence Durrell, the British writer born in India in 1912 who spent most of his life travelling to Greece, Egypt, Argentina, Bosnia and ultimately France where he died in 1990, is mainly known for his work as a prose writer. Yet, he was first a poet and strove throughout his literary career to be recognized as such. His first collections of poetry were published several decades before his famous Alexandria Quartet.2 Quaint Fragments was issued in 1931, Ten Poems in 1932, Transition : Poems in 1934. Lawrence Durrell continued to edit his poems as late as 1980, when the last edition of his Collected Poems was issued by Faber, while continuing to insert poems into his prose, with a frequency that increased steadily over the years: his last work of fiction, The Avignon Quintet, comprises stunning new poems, while his last residence book, Caesar’s Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, includes his last poetic pieces.

Throughout his career he never ceased to question the role and meaning of poetry in our society, starting as early as the 1940s. Lawrence Durrell’s first analytic pieces were published in the poetry review Personal Landscape which he launched with his friends Robin Fedden and Bernard Spencer in 1941 in Cairo and which drew many contemporary British and Greek poets. This is the place Durrell chose to publish some of his early poems as well as some of his personal thoughts on poetry, paving the way for the meta-poetic reflexion which he will later develop in his essay Key to Modern Poetry. We shall see how these first lines attempting to define the poet’s art prepare the reader for the historical, philosophical and aesthetic stakes of Durrell’s essay, and lead him to reconsider the writer both as an artist and as a modern thinker who attempts to reshape

1. Lawrence durrell, « Ideas about Poems II », in: Personal Landscape, 1942, 2; Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, London, Editions Poetry London, 1945, p. 74; the poem was printed in italics in the poetry review and in the anthology; minor alterations were made in the final version of Collected Poems published in 1985.

2. The Alexandria Quartet was initially published in four separate volumes in 1962 before the one volume edition was issued in 1968.

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his contemporaries’ reception of poetry by freeing himself from the norms and forms of academic discourse. Indeed, Durrell’s criticism goes well beyond the scope of his essay Key to Modern Poetry: it pervades his notes inserted in poetry magazines where his poetic insights read like displaced poems, it seeps through his fiction where characters disparagingly comment on Ruskin or Trollope,3 emphasising the modernist stance of The Alexandria Quartet, it shapes out entire poems that are built as aesthetic and metaphysical reflections of and upon past works.4 For the sake of brevity and clarity we shall focus here exclusively on Key to Modern Poetry, bearing in mind that the extent and subtlety of Durrell’s criticism deserves a wider study. When Durrell asserts that “[...] great poetry is everywhere outside the range of such futile categories as we critics put up around it”5 he is suggesting the delicate position of the critic whose message escapes the narrow boundaries of the critical essay and inviting his reader “by indirections to find directions out”.6 This may account for the specificity of Durrell’s criticism as he deliberately casts an indirect gaze on his own work by addressing other writers’ achievements, refuses to offer any stable definition of the art of writing7 and constantly teases his interviewers while hiding behind contradictory statements.8 Incidentally, the complex relationships between Durrell’s critical texts and his self-referential discourse may also explain why Lawrence Durrell’s literary criticism has so far never been studied by Durrellians or any other academic researcher.

If we assume with Lawrence Durrell that one can never ascribe a definite place to the poet who, behind the critic’s garb, chooses to stand “outside the range” of those “[…] many critics and lecturers in this domain [who] cut up their subject and anatomize it rationally–[so] that in the end it tastes like an apple cut with a steel knife”9 then the writer as a critic puts his own existence and legitimacy at risks: he may well never be heard any more, either as an artist or as a critic. Taking on the role of those he derides – let us remember the powerful slap Darley is given by Clea in The Quartet when he confesses he intends to write a critical essay10 – Lawrence Durrell jeopardises his own discourse as a critic and as a writer: he seems to adopt the treacherous position of the one who takes refuge behind the other’s words, the “ogre” feeding on his victim. Unless this were just another literary game, one of the writer’s elusive masks?

3. Lawrence durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, London, Faber, 1974, 752-5.

4. Such as is the case, for instance, of “On First Looking into Loeb’s Horace”, which sends us back to Horace’s Odes and to Keats’s poem “On First looking into Chapman’s Homer”.

5. Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, London, Peter Nevill, 206.

6. William ShaKeSPeare, Hamlet, O.U.P., 1994, II i l.65, 200.

7. “How many times a day do I change my mind about writing?” asks Durrell when asked by a fellow writer how he feels about writing, “From a Writer’s Journal”, in: The Windmill, 1947 2, 6, 50.

8. A detailed study of the interviews edited by Earl G. Ingersoll in Lawrence Durrell. Conversations (London, Associated University Presses, 1998) still has to be carried out. My hypothesis is that it would show how Durrell both unveils and conceals his literary sources and builds up a mythology on his own production that may not be faithful to facts but nevertheless conveys a hidden truth on his writing method and artistic outlook.

9. Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., x.

10. “�Criticism!’ she echoed sharply, as if the word were an insult. And she smacked me full “�Criticism!’ she echoed sharply, as if the word were an insult. And she smacked me full across the mouth […]. I looked like an ogre who had just taken a mouthful of bleeding flesh from his victims” (The Alexandria Quartet, op. cit., 839).

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1. t

he liminalPosition ofthe Poet

-

CritiC

Personal Landscape offers the reader both the theory on and the practice of poetry by interweaving poems and essays, amongst which “Ideas About Poems”, published in March 1942. It comprises a series of “notes on poetry”, to which various poets contributed, and is introduced as “personal and private”, “the expression of attitudes, of moods”, “as backgrounds to sections of their authors’ work”.11 Reflecting the strongly independent stance of the 1930s’ British poets, these notes

“do not present a manifesto” and may appear “diametrically opposite in standpoint one to another”.12 Durrell and his poet friends were not trying to found a school but to establish themselves as individual voices. Such a perspective already enlightens the reader on Durrell’s theoretic and stylistic stance in Key where he steers free from

“the pedagogic lumber”13 and offers his reader “a brief disintoxication course”14 from the perspective of one who pretends to be “deficient in true scholarship”.15 Unlike most of his brilliant contemporaries, Durrell had indeed never been to college and could thus claim to write from the position of the outsider, of the marginal artist whose vast erudition took everyone by surprise. Furthermore, the first lines of authorial self-comment published in Personal Landscape not only serve to introduce Durrell as a poet and as a critic, they also evince the writer’s quest for words, his constant, tentative probing of language:

Logic, syntax, is a causal instrument, inadequate for the task of describing the whole of reality. Poems don’t describe, but they are sounding boards which enable the alert consciousness to pick up the reverberations of the extra-causal reality for itself.

Poems are negatives; hold them up to a clean surface of daylight and you get an apprehension of grace. The words carry in them complete submerged poems; as you read your memory goes down like the loud pedal of a piano, and all tribal, personal associations begin to reverberate. Poems are blueprints.

They are not buildings but they enable you to build for yourself.16

The first part of this quotation enables us to grasp the function of poetry in Durrell’s opus: it is the least awkward mode of communication because it enables the artist’s voice to break free from the constraints of syntactic and causal logic and opens the reader’s inner ear to potentially boundless echoes. Resorting to the metaphor of music Durrell displaces here the language of criticism towards poetry.

This shifts both puts at risk the analytic content of his criticism and unsettles the reader who must decide whether he is reading a poetic piece of criticism or a poem on literature.

Simultaneously Durrell raises one of the paradoxes of criticism: how can the critic ascertain the correct distance between the object described and its description? This assertive and metaphorical definition of poetry was aimed at a choice readership: the review, which was later to be reissued in London as an

11. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, « Ideas about Poems II », in: Personal Landscape, 2, op. cit., 2; Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, op. cit., 72.

12. Ibid., 72.

13. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., X.

14. Ibidem.

15. Ibidem.

16. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, op. cit., 73.

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anthology (Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile) in 1945, originally consisted in 8 issues published at author’s expense between 1941 and 1945. As such it was initially designed as the space of a poetic experiment that would eventually bring many as yet unknown poets into the limelight: Terence Tiller, Bernard Spencer, George Seferis, etc. As early as 1942, one can sense in Durrell’s critical lines the ongoing self-reflexive work of the poet who strives to circumscribe and decipher the poetic act while attempting to fathom his own poetics as well as the delicate quintessence of poetry. In so doing Durrell clearly places himself in the wake of those poets described by the critic H. V. Routh whose work served as a basis for the essays published in Key to Modern Poetry: “[...] man should be a revelation to himself, limited only by his own vision” seeking and sharing “[...] the pursuit of beauty and truth in all its most accessible and communal forms”.17

Exploring beauty and truth through its varied forms Durrell does not exclude the poetic act from the critical discourse and develops a form of criticism that is just as much aware of the limits of language as his poetry. Consequently his criticism, just as his poetry, must be taken as the clue to a greater whole. In that respect Lawrence Durrell places himself in the wake of T. S. Eliot. T. S Eliot, the friend and mentor who corrected and published Durrell’s poems at Faber’s and who confided to him the blueprints of his own poems also seems to have taught him that the art of criticism, just like the art of poetry, lies in its elusiveness, in its openness to the beauty and truth that may shine out of common language and reveal, in T. S. Eliot’s own words, the power of “[…] this obscure impulse […] a burden which he [the poet] must bring to birth in order to obtain relief ”.18 Just as T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Durrell chooses the beauty of the image, the distant brotherhood of words and similes to define the indefinable, the “something”

that perpetually evades language. “He [the poet] has something germinating in him for which he must find words”,19 T. S. Eliot said: this “something” is the

“apprehension of grace”, the “submerged” creation through which Lawrence Durrell tries to reorient both our poetic and analytic reception of literature.

This early definition of poetry, which already reads like a prose poem structured around a binary rhythm, heralds the detailed, erudite criticism of poetry which Durrell develops ten years later in Key to Modern Poetry. Following the lectures he delivered for the British Council in Argentina in 1948, Lawrence Durrell, helped by his poet friend John Gawsworth, eventually gave his thoughts a wider audience in 1952. Durrell’s thoughts on poetry are then no longer “personal and private”

and are bound to follow a pedagogic organization, a structural method, despite the poet’s reluctance who asserts in his preface “It is a sketch for a Method – not a painting in oils”, thus resorting to a Cartesian vocabulary whose authoritative tone he simultaneously undermines through the metaphor opposing the sketch and the painting, the ephemeral trace of the pencil against the permanent stain of paint.

Durrell’s method is indeed changing over the years as the poet seeks to marry the associative movement of poetry and the descriptive, logical outlook of criticism.

In Personal Landscape these approaches were set sharply against each other:

17. H. V. H. V. routh, English Literature and Ideas in the Twentieth Century, New York, Russell &

Russell, 1970 [1946], 193.

18. The Three Voices of Poetry, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1954, 29.

19. Ibid., 28.

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Describing, logic limits. Its law is causality.

Poetry by its associative approach transcends its own syntax in order not to describe but to be the cause of apprehension in others:

Transcending logic it invades a realm where unreason reigns, and where the relations between ideas are sympathetic and mysterious – affective – rather than causal, objective, substitutional.

I call this the Heraldic Universe […].20

In Key, Durrell sets to explain “barbarities of technique and curiosities of form”21 in an attempt to touch those readers who may resist direct

“apprehension”. Durrell the poet becomes the go-between, the translator of his elders’ “Heraldic Universe”. It is noteworthy that the publication of his lectures should have taken so long and necessitated the hand of another poet, as if any reflection on poetry could only take place sideways, through the mediation of a dragoman. We are thus entering a meta-discourse, a postponed comment, which, as Anna Angelopoulos explains, “introduces time […] the time span of the passage from one language to another”.22 In that respect, Durrell’s discourse on poetry in Key is markedly different from his first literary comments in Personal Landscape: the other’s hand, be it that of John Gawsworth contributing to the organization of the book, or that of the various poets Durrell studies throughout, enables him to engage in a very particular kind of exchange with his audience. Never are we allowed to forget his twofold target–“my students (and now, I hope, the common reader to whom this book is addressed)”23 – which is potentially limitless: the students in Argentina quickly come to stand for any student, the common reader ranges from “the most well-disposed of readers”

to “the poor literature teacher”.24 To each and every reader Durrell offers his help as a dragoman, as a translator of “something incredibly difficult and arcane”25: modern poetry. Durrell introduces himself in the very first lines of his preface as a teacher aiming to “supply a satisfactory key to the complexities of contemporary practice in poetry, and […] to give a brief account of the poets writing today”.26 Yet, on the left hand-side of this first page, the reader is reminded of the fact that Durrell is as much a prose writer as a poet. Indeed, we do not meet the author’s name on the threshold of his preface but, instead, a list of his perfectly balanced literary output:

20. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, op. cit., 72.

21. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., ix.

22. “Dans ma langue, en grec, on dit métaphrase : une formulation d’après-coup (méta signifie après) donc une expression qui introduit le temps dans la traduction, la temporalité du passage d’une langue à l’autre.” (“In my language, Greek, we say metaphrasis: a subsequent turn of phrase (meta means after), i.e., an expression that brings time into the translation, the time span inherent to the passage from one language to another”, (my translation)) – Anna anGeloPouloS, “Le drogman”, in:

Georg R. Garner, L’étoffe du réel, Paris, Fédération des Ateliers de pyschanalyse, 2013, 6). Although A. Angelopoulos is discussing here the figure of the dragoman, the Ottoman interpreter, as a metaphor for the task assumed by the psychoanalyst, we shall see that the position of the poet commenting on the poetry of others and indirectly enlightening the reader on his own work is not altogether dissimilar.

23. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., x.

24. Ibid., ix.

25. Ibidem.

26. Ibidem.

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“By the same author novelS

Panic Spring Cefalu

The Black Book Prospero’s Cell Poetry

A Private Country Cities, Plains and People On Seeming to Presume Sappho: a Play”

The fact that Sappho should be inserted under the heading “Poetry” becomes highly significant in the ninth chapter where Durrell discusses “the vogue of the verse-play”27 geared by T.S. Eliot.28 Durrell thus implicitly places himself in the wake of the experienced, daring and much-admired master of all contemporary poets. He is a poet amongst poets: by including in the paratext the very material he chooses to discuss in his book, he becomes both the object and the subject of his own study. In that respect he is no different from other great writers such as W.

Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, D.H Lawrence, E. M. Forster, R. M. Rilke, or W. H.

Auden whom he quotes either in his epigraphs or in his chapters and whose words are valuable both as literary creations and as literary comments. However, we shall see that Durrell’s self-referential comments are only revealed indirectly, through his reading of others, thus confirming our intuition that he is taking on the critic’s garb as another mask behind which the writer’s work continues to develop, bearing witness to the assertion that “[...] meanwhile the search goes on”.29 Typically, Durrell is once again using language as a screen, i.e., as a space upon which he projects his personal images for all to see and a space that hides yet another space.30 In this way Durrell suggests that there is more to see than meets the eye in his criticism and that the reader should look beyond the ex-planation (in the etymological meaning of ex-planus, to flatten, to unfold) he provides on other poets for a second folding of the text upon itself.31

2. K

ey

: P

uttingthe artofCritiCismintoabyss

A structuralist approach of Key reveals that Durrell adopts the codes of the critical essay as a genre, thereby building an apparently transparent pact with the reader. However we shall see how the overt presence of the characteristic features of

27. Ibid., 189.

28. The reference to T. S. Eliot’s work on poetic drama (1919) and dramatic poetry (1928) is The reference to T. S. Eliot’s work on poetic drama (1919) and dramatic poetry (1928) is obvious in these pages (see T. S. Eliot, Collected Essays, London, Faber, 1953 [1932], 37-58).

29. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, “From a Writer’s Journal”, The Windmill, op. cit., 53.

30. See our studies on Durrell’s language as a screen in Corinne See our studies on Durrell’s language as a screen in Corinne alexandre-Garner and Isabelle Keller-Privat, “�Manufacturing Dreams’ or Lawrence Durrell’s Fiction Revisted through the Prism of De Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting”, in: Deus Loci, NS 13, 2012-2013, 85-109; Corinne alexandre-Garner and Isabelle Keller-Privat, “Writing (on) walls or the palimpsest of time”

in: Donald P. KaczvinSKy (ed.), The Alexandria Quartet”, Durrell and the City, Collected Essays on Place, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012, 63-79.

31. See Gilles deleuze, Le Pli : Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1988.

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literary discourse does not preclude the text from hinting at another level of reading through which Durrell’s essay marks its differe/ance32 from purely critical works.

Key relies on a transphrastic organization33 that follows the rules of a well established genre and reflects the specific norms which warrant its legitimacy. The table of contents, for instance, testifies to the construction of an authoritative, thoroughly informed literary discourse which starts by questioning the validity of the enunciative source (chapter I: The Limits of Criticism), before examining

“the revolutions in ideas”34 that have shaped modern poetry: our conceptions of time and of the psyche. The following chapters (chapter II: Space Time in Poetry;

chapter III: The World Within; chapter IV: Beyond the Ego?) evince a faultlessly didactic organization. The last five chapters are devoted to the second part Durrell announces in his preface: “a brief account of the poets writing today”.35 Such an outline foreshadows a well planned discourse bent on explaining how the historical and philosophical context has shaped modern poetry and thought before concentrating on its various modes of expression through the works of accomplished and famous authors (T. S. Eliot, G. M. Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, E. Sitwell). Significantly, Durrell the critic refrains from taking the risk of praising unknown contemporary poet friends, ranking for instance David Gascoyne amongst the “number of dark horses coming up on the outside which look as if they will finish in style”,36 yet refusing to bet on the future.

This well mastered architecture is also a form of action: Durrell’s critical discourse is part of a wider tradition he relies on and is consciously part of the world which it seeks to explain. This is how Durrell can refer both to Aristotle37 and to Wordsworth38 while conceding: “to explain a work of art takes us unfortunately further away from its real meaning–which the sensibility will recognize as a whole, not a series of parts. We must keep this in mind, too, when we come to think as critics”.39 The carefully didactic transitions from one chapter to the next are part of a deliberately self-aware study: chapter one ends on the notion of “Time as an idea”, referring to the representation and distortion of time in Woolf and Joyce and concluding “Time is one of the great clues to the modern outlook”,40 chapter II logically opens on the concept of space-time developed by Einstein and its reworking in fiction through the creation of a “space-time continuum in […] words or phrases”.41 Chapter II concludes on what Durrell identifies as one

32. We are facing here another instance of the infinite concatenation of signifiers as described by Jacques Derrida: « Est-ce un hasard […] si le sens du sens […] c’est l’implication infinie ? Le renvoi indéfini de signifiant à signifiant ? Si sa force est une certaine équivocité pure et infinie […]

l’engageant […] à faire signe encore et à différer ? » (L’écriture et la différence, Paris, Seuil, 1967, 42).

“Is this an accident if […] the meaning of meaning […] is infinite implication? The indefinite reference from signifier to signifier? Is it an accident if its strength lies in a relative, pure and infinite equivocality […] compelling it […] to produce yet another sign and to differ?” (my translation).

33. We refer the reader to Dominique Maingueneau’s description of the literary discourse in We refer the reader to Dominique Maingueneau’s description of the literary discourse in Le Discours littéraire, Paratopie et scène d’énonciation, Paris, Armand Colin, 2004, 31-35.

34. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 207.

35. Ibid., IX.

36. Ibid., 208.

37. Ibid., 3.

38. Ibid., 7.

39. Ibid., 4.

40. Ibid., 23.

41. Ibid., 26.

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of the main characteristics of our age: our non-moral view and our acceptance of duality, paving the way for a move from the outer to the inner universe, “the domain of the psyche”.42 Meanwhile, the author makes sure that the reader never loses sight of the main, founding hypotheses, reasserting in chapter II “that art is only a dialect of a language”43 (a direct echo to the first page of chapter I) or concluding that “causality and time are no longer certain certainties”44 in chapter IV. Acting as a true, pragmatic teacher, Durrell constantly recalls his main tenets, repeatedly shoring up his proofs. In so doing Durrell is anchoring his criticism in a markedly significant historical an epistemological context while constantly taking responsibility for every single hypothesis and commentary he offers. By quoting other renowned critics, such as Dr. Peters commenting on Hopkins,45 or T. S. Eliot’s assessment of the poet’s task,46 by opening his first two chapters on an epigraph from H. V. Routh’s English Literature and Ideas in the Twentieth Century, or referring to the choices made by poetry editors such as Harold Monro47 Durrell places himself in the long chain of literary critics and thinkers, leaving his own furrow in a rich and complex field. Significantly, most of the new voices of the thirties he praises in 1948 as well as the more recent poets he examines and sets as exemplars of the new poetic output are to this day the object of an ongoing, appreciative criticism.

Poets such as W. H. Auden, George Barker, Cecil Day Lewis, William Empson, David Gascoyne, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Muir, Herbert Read, Bernard Spencer, Dylan Thomas, to name but a few, are now part of the canon of British poetry in the thirties, testifying to Durrell’s insightful analysis.48 As a consequence, the reader is meant to ponder on the critic’s engagement: purporting to explain a mysterious form of art, Durrell also acts as a seer who, beyond the mere description of the wheels and cogs of writing, commits himself by naming the new poetic voices that will shape the future. Taking the risk of praising the lesser known he shows us that literature, far from being merely a form of escape (“Escape is the endless theme of our contemplation, escape, escape”, as Gregory Death exclaimed in The Black Book49), it is also, to paraphrase the title of V. S. Naipaul’s novel, A way in the world. By reorienting literary criticism towards the unforeseeable future Durrell surreptitiously breaks away from the old tradition that carefully trod safe ground by focusing on long dead authors. This is one of the ways through which Durrell subtly perverts the codes of the critical tradition.

Moreover, the reader cannot but be struck by the modernity and wisdom of Durrell’s literary approach. Indeed the late 1940s and early 1950s were times when an artist’s work used to be accounted for through his biography and, although each author was ascribed a specific place within the various periods of literary history, little was said on his technique or on the specificities of his practice. Writers were judged in terms of moral values rather than on their stylistic innovations.

42. Ibid., 48.

43. Ibid., 44.

44. Ibid., 86.

45. Ibid., 173.

46. Ibid., 136.

47. Ibid., 120.

48. Amongst other sources, I refer the reader to the bilingual anthology published by Michèle Amongst other sources, I refer the reader to the bilingual anthology published by Michèle ducloS, Poésie britannique des années trente, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996.

49. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, The Black Book, London, Faber, 1973 [1938], 160.

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Therefore, although Durrell may seem to be offering what looks like the archetype of the literary discourse, he is also breaking new ground by asserting a radically new form of criticism when declaring: “Yet if poems reflect their age at all we may be able to dig under the surface for their cosmological content, and leave the personal data to look after itself ”.50

In a structuralist fashion, Durrell’s essay adumbrates what was to become

“new criticism” in the 1960s, in which various contradictory traditions merged:

thematic analyses, Russian formalism, philosophical and historical perspectives that relied on Marxism, psychoanalysis or existentialism in order to explain the causes underlying creative production. Maingueneau argues that new criticism overcame the 19th century’s rift by merging the aesthetic concern of artists for the creation of an independent, organic whole and the biographical perspective of academic philologists interested in literary documents.51 As Genette explains:

A style effect in this case is of course both a question of technical practice and of vision, to borrow Proust’s words. It is neither the expression of pure “feeling”

(looking for the best way to express itself), nor a mere “manner of speech”

(which would be devoid of meaning): it is precisely a form, i.e., the way in which language both divides and organizes words and things.52

When attempting to “dig under the surface” Lawrence Durrell clearly advocates a reading that leaves aside the biographical elements in order to understand how the work of art builds up a new vision of the world. Opening his work on the influence of emerging theories (the theory of relativity, psychoanalysis and Marxism) upon literary creation Durrell introduces a yet unheard of reading method which was spreading fast within literary circles under the influence of Virginia Woolf but which was still revolutionary for the layman. Relying in the epigraph of chapter I on the authority of H. V. Routh, Durrell starts his essay by striking a definitely modern note: “[…] literature is only one facet of the prism which we call culture. All the arts and sciences are simply different dialects of the same language […] Ideas from the various department of thought cross-fertilize each other […]”.53 As a consequence a higher awareness of the world both affects the production and the reception of the work of art and reveals “[...] a universe perpetually shifting, changing its relations and tenses as verbs do in speech, altering its outlines”.54 Significantly Durrell’s critical prose also enacts this shift through the multilayered reading that his essay calls for. Adumbrating the poetic innovations of the coming decades and reorienting the axis of critical interpretation Lawrence Durrell encourages us to search for what H. V. Routh calls “[...] a glimpse into the Unknown”.55 This new reading method is fundamental to the understanding

50. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 14.

51. See Dominique mainGueneau, Le Discours littéraire, Paratopie et scène d’énonciation, op. cit., 19-20.

52. “Le fait de style est ici, bien évidemment, pour recourir au vocabulaire proustien, tout à la fois de l’ordre de la technique et de la vision : ce n’est ni pur « sentiment » (qui s’exprimerait du mieux qu’il pourrait), ni une simple ‘façon de parler’ (qui n’exprimerait rien) : c’est précisément une forme, une manière qu’a le langage de diviser et d’ordonner à la fois les mots et les choses” (Gérard Genette, Figures II, Paris, Seuil, 1969, 20, my translation).

53. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 1.

54. Ibid., IX.

55. English Literature and Ideas in the Twentieth Century, op.cit., 1.

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of the Modernist heritage which Durrell defends through a careful analysis of James Joyce’s narrative technique. This is why he primarily explains how scientists studying the principle of indeterminacy came to the conclusion that “the ultimate laws of nature were simply not causal at all”,56 and were thus lead to “accept two contradictory ideas as simultaneously true”,57 before inviting his reader to put into practice the very principle of cross-fertilization he describes through a comparison between Proust and Joyce’s characters:

Their books do not proceed along a straight line, but in a circular manner, coiling and uncoiling upon themselves, embedded in a stagnant flux and reflux medium which is always changing yet always the same. […] Characters have a significance almost independent of the actions they engage in: they hang above the time-track […].58

As well as studying the modifications of characterization in modern novels, Durrell carries out precise stylistic analyses, such as when he shows how “the relation of subject verb and object in the simple sentence has been disturbed, no less than the relation of the sentence to the paragraph and the paragraph to the book”.59 Hence, Durrell relies on a close reading of modern poetics as a key to the understanding of modern poetry, which enables him to present a comprehensive interpretation of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that embraces intertextual and thematic references (“the anguish of Laforgue”,

“Rilke’s Duinese Elegies”), stylistic analysis (“the dislocation of language”) and ends on a balanced literary assessment: (“a masterly excursion into a new realm of sensibility”60). In many other instances Durrell surprises the modern reader by his sharp, demanding reading, such as when he uses Rilke’s concept of “lyric totals” to illuminate Gerontion’s utterances and thus explain “the apparent lack of grammatical continuity between the various parts of the poem”.61 His close attention to stylistic and linguistic devices enables us to feel the sharpness of his linguistic sensitivity, the keen search for poetic effects, the crafter at work behind the critic. Advocating a reading that takes into account the influence of the world upon the word, Durrell simultaneously shows how the word shapes and renews our relation to the world. Thus, the “acceptance of duality”62 that creators have inherited from modern physics and expressed through the various layers of simultaneous associations in the stream of consciousness technique refashions the reader’s perspective. Literature can no longer be considered as an edifying instance of style and elegance, of dignity and morality, but as the very means through which the individual’s view of the world and of his own self–

as a socio-historical subject and as a thinking conscience–may be regenerated.

Durrell shows that Man’s hold on life in the universe is no longer akin to that of the all-powerful and domineering master but has become precarious, tentative, giving V. Woolf ’s words a very contemporary ring: “Life is a luminous halo, a

56. Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 25.

57. Ibid., 31.

58. Ibidem.

59. Ibid., 36.

60. Ibid., 41.

61. Ibid., 37.

62. Ibid., 46.

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semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”63.

However risky the endeavour may seem, Durrell wants to “convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit”,64 in Woolf ’s own words, both as a writer and as a critic. In the light of this new creative and interpretative approach through which the writer and the critic meet eye to eye, the critic’s discourse appears as a delicate, empiric attempt at bridging the gap between two distinct experiences of literature so as to “avoid the sin of a closed system”.65 It is then no wonder that Durrell’s reading of modern poetry should rely on psychoanalysis, thus echoing Freud’s intuition according to which the psychoanalyst and the writer explore the same mysterious field: “[...] poets and novelists are precious allies”.66 After a brief survey of the influence of Freud’s theories on the self and the unconscious, Durrell uses the metaphor of language in order to suggest an analogy between the dream and the poem: just as poems, dreams are, according to Durrell’s reading of Freud’s concepts, “a kind of language in which, under various poetical disguises, the secrets of the unconscious could be discovered at work”67. The poem, like the dream, is a form of displacement, a way out of logical and moral codes. Therefore reading a poem and reading a dream require similar skills: the reader-interpreter must piece together “the thousand fragments of a Greek vase which the archaeologist’s patience assembles into a single and beautiful whole”68. Such an image is quite telling of the analytical process at work in the reading of poetry: it is a process of excavation and re- membering that connects the reader to a mythological and symbolic substratum which shapes not only the artist’s work but also our common world view. It is a long, humble, sometimes hopeless task which Durrell takes up, such as when he tries to understand the “formidable piece of compression [that] lies behind a simple statement”69 in one of W. H. Auden’s lines or extends his analysis to the compression of “sound-values […] often coming in the middle of the line instead of being set like a milestone at the end of every five stresses”70. Freud’s concepts are not used to build up a psychoanalytical reading of the creative act or of its author. Rather, the subtleties of the dream are explored to serve an analytic reading of the text: the links pointed out by Freud between individual dreams and archetypal myths, the specific relationship to time enacted through the dream or the psyche’s deep longing for a hidden truth expressed through compression and displacement enable Durrell to sharpen our awareness of poetic devices and to enhance their relevance in our fathoming of man’s psyche. However, when discussing Groddeck’s IT in the following chapter, Durrell shows both the limits of the analyst’s scope and of the critic’s powers: just as the analyst is unable to trace back the original cause of a disease and has to be satisfied with exploring

63. Ibidem.

64. Ibidem.

65. Ibid., 6.

66. “[…] les poètes et romanciers sont de précieux alliés” (Sigmund Freud, Délire et rêves dans la « Gradiva » de Jensen, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, 127, my translation).

67. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 52.

68. Ibid., 57.

69. Ibid., 61.

70. Ibid., 65.

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“only the fringes”71 of the unconscious, the critic cannot circumscribe poetry in words: “in understanding poetry it is always the words which get in the way”.72 Eventually, one may read in this seminal chapter entitled “Beyond the Ego?” an echo of the very question the writer-critic asks himself: how can he, sharing his elders’ quest, express a transcended personality, how can he free himself from the rigid shell of the ego? The critic, in order to step over and break again with the familiar pattern of an assertive, ego-centred criticism, opens his text to the others’

voice.

This is why Durrell chooses to give Otto Rank the final argument in which the reader cannot fail to recognize the distant echo of Durrell’s fictional voices:

“The new type of humanity” in which “a man with creative power […] can give up artistic expression in favour of the formation of personality”73 is none other than the one embodied by the artist Balthazar describes in The Quartet: “The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art”.74 The fictional layer underlying Durrell’s critical discourse functions as an implicit metatextual comment that applies not only to the novel itself but also to the essay.

Thus Durrell goes much further than merely referring indirectly to his own creative act within his critical work: he shows how literature constantly infringes upon textual barriers and shatters any form of discourse. The disseminating power of the word,

“vast perspectives of dispersal”75 says the poet, demands a new kind of reading that constantly branches off and reflects the law of indeterminacy. This is how Durrell’s critical discourse succeeds in putting into abyss the frailty of any definite literary statement: “[…] in the last analysis great poetry reflects an unknown in the interpretation and understanding of which all knowledge is refunded into ignorance.

It points towards a Something which itself subsists without distinction”.76 Just as Groddeck, who “reach[ed] the boundaries of the ego”,77 Durrell admits facing the impassable boundaries of literary discourse. Calling for the critic’s humility his essay is still relevant nowadays, at a time when critical trends and analytical grids often turn out to act as a screen between the text and the reader, evading, erasing the literary object to the benefit of a self-promoting critical discourse that hopelessly wants to define a surge that defies language. “Underneath the whole question of poetry an unstateable proposition, like the shadowed side of the moon”,78 warns the poet-critic.

3. b

eyondCritiCism

:

themysteryofWriting

When observing Lawrence Durrell’s gaze upon his fellow writers one cannot refrain from visualizing those peculiar cubist compositions contemporaneous with the poetic landscape of the 1930s, when painters played on fragmented perspectives which threw the onlooker off balance. As Georg Garner explains:

71. Ibid., 75.

72. Ibid., 84.

73. Ibid., 88.

74. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, London, Faber, 1974, 306.

75. Lawrence Lawrence durrell « Seferis », Vega, London, Faber, 1973, 54.

76. Lawrence Lawrence durrell Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 90.

77. Ibid., 73.

78. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, “From a Writer’s Journal”, The Windmill, op. cit., 52.

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Perspective does exist in the cubist space. But it is fragmented. A bilingual poem by Ezra Pound says in two lines: �Le paradis existe / but it is is jagged.’

[…] The spectator no longer holds a fixed locus. Likewise, the spectator can no longer enjoy the illusion and pleasure of mastering this space. […] The new perspective ushered in by the cubist space stages incomplete impulses for incomplete objects.79

Similarly, Durrell, when tracing back the socio-historical context of Kipling’s poetry, the emergence of British socialists, when describing the influence of Baudelaire, or following the curves of Yeats’ “Lake”, produces a somewhat jagged, cubist picture of his own literary influences. The literary survey we are given to read from the poetry of the 1890s, to the Georgians and Imagists, to T. S. Eliot and G. M. Hopkins up to the new voices of the 1930s is to be interpreted both as a snapshot of the literary landscape of the day and as an introspective, metatextual and fragmented image of the literary world inhabiting Durrell’s creation. This accounts for a contradictory structure: despite the pedagogic and linear organisation of the whole, the recurring references to key authors compose a circular pattern sending the reader back on his tracks. Thus T. S. Eliot’s words recur obsessively throughout the essay: he is first quoted in chapter I when Durrell compares “Gerontion” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses”,80 his Four Quartets are mentioned in chapter II,81 “Gerontion”

reappears in chapter III.82 Eliot is mentioned along with Auden, Spender and Sitwell in chapter IV as numbering among the authors focusing on “Time and the ego”.83 His name crops up again in the sixth chapter devoted to Georgians and the Imagists84 where Durrell studies an extract from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.85 In the same chapter Eliot’s words on the poet’s “continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable”86 serve Durrell’s argument on the necessary depersonalization of the creative artist. Chapter VII is entirely devoted to T. S. Eliot; yet Durrell, seemingly failing to circumscribe this literary genius, or feeling inevitably drawn back to his mentor, studies him again in his analysis of the verse-play in the ninth chapter.87 In the last chapter Eliot appears amongst the living elders who continue to shape out poetry’s future.88 Likewise, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Edith Sitwell are amongst those ever present figures haunting Durrell’s writing and one cannot help but feel, beneath the straightforward academic style, the poet’s mind coiling around crucial literary figures.

79. “La perspective est parfaitement présente dans l’espace cubiste. Mais elle est fragmentée.

Un poème bilingue d’Ezra Pound dit en deux lignes: ‘Le paradis existe / but it is is jagged’. […] La place du spectateur n’est plus assignable. Et par la même occasion, le spectateur ne peut plus se complaire dans l’illusion et la jouissance de la maîtrise de cet espace. […] La nouvelle perspective que l’espace cubiste inaugure met en scène des pulsions partielles pour des objets partiels” (Georg R. Garner, L’étoffe du réel, op. cit., p. 35, my translation).

80. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 9.

81. Ibid., 37.

82. Ibid., 57.

83. Ibid., 83.

84. Ibid., 120; 125-126.

85. Ibid., 126-128.

86. Ibid., 136.

87. Ibid., 189-91.

88. Ibid., 205.

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Not surprisingly, the reader recognises in Durrell’s academic assessment of those literary giants the very tenets at work in his own poetics. Trying to define the “cosmology”89 of the age, Durrell asserts the provisional nature of truth, the ever moving, unstable nature of reality that turns any form of discourse on it into a distortion,90 the all-encompassing presence of death,91 and the subjective nature of any perception.92 Having thus unveiled the cornerstone of his own fictional universe he proceeds to examine literary pieces fraught with echoes to his own poetry. Reading in “Gerontion” “a sort of autobiography through the lips of an old man, a hero, who sits before his house, thinking about death”,93 Durrell reminds us of “Cities, Plains and People”, the most autobiographical of his poems, closing on the figure of Prospero who: “[...] by his open door / In sunlight fell asleep / One summer with the Apple in his hand”.94 “Cities, Plains and People”, just as “Gerontion”, may be read as “a series of ticker-tape messages coming in from some remote stock-room, and being recorded haphazardly one after the other. Memory, reflections, desire–all seem inextricably tangled up [...]”.95 Gerontion’s quest haunts Durrell long after: Durrell sees in Eliot’s yearning for

“a sign! / The word within a word”96 the proof that “It is revelation and not more knowledge that Gerontion appears to be waiting for”.97 Twenty years later, Durrell takes up the same quest and concludes his poem “The Reckoning”, with:

“It is not meaning that we need but sight”.98 Whilst still in Argentina, Durrell publishes “On Seeming to Presume”, echoing Eliot’s question in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “So how should I presume?”.99 Simultaneously, his reading in Freud’s interpretation of dreams of “the repressed impulse, looking for an escape hatch”100 weaves its way into his own poems on Greece. Whether we think of “Delos” (“The statues of the dead here / Embark on sunlight [...]”101), or of “At Epidaurus” where “The olive signs the hill, signifying revival”,102 we realise that poetry is for Durrell’s both a means to escape and connect, to free one’s repressed impulses in a constant quest to attain a deeper truth for which the living beauty of Greece stands as an eternal symbol. Durrell’s parallel reading of Groddeck and contemporary poets also enables him to sketch out the ideal approach to his own texts: “It is a great pity we cannot inhale poems like scents [...]. That is why one should, if possible, allow poems to impact themselves upon one without too much dissection of detail. Let them be totals to experience first of all”.103

89. Ibid., 2.

90. Ibid., 3.

91. Ibid., 4.

92. Ibid., 5.

93. Ibid., 8.

94. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Collected Poems 1931-1974, London, Faber & Faber, 1985, 173.

95. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 9.

96. Ibid., 12.

97. Ibidem.

98. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Collected Poems 1931-1974, op. cit., 301.

99. T. S. T. S. eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, London, Faber, 2002, 5.

100. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 56.

101. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Collected Poems 1931-1974, op. cit., 132.

102. Ibid., 97.

103. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 84.

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Choosing poets that cast a slanting light on his own poetry Lawrence Durrell not only uses criticism as an indirect means for self-commentary: he shows how poetry functions as the key which opens the door both to a universal and intimate unconscious, helping the reader catch a glimpse of the thick layers of his own personal mists, engaging him in a parallel, fascinating journey where the law of random associations and fruitful displacements rules. In other words, he invites the reader to share not only his texts but his conception of poetry throughout an essay in which the critical discourse is a mere pre-text to the secret unfolding of poetic correspondences. Like Baudelaire, Durrell resorts to poetry “as a direct means of communication”104 that, by bringing closer the resounding notes of distant echoes, points towards the ineffable, which is the true essence of poetry:

“a congeries of symbols which transfers an enigmatic knowledge to the reader”.105 Therefore Durrell’s critical approach appears to be based on an aporia:

stealthily breaking free from the critical discourse he has adopted he considers poetry both as the object under study and as an explanatory device. Such an aporia accounts for interpretative tensions that prevent the reader from defining Durrell’s critical stance. Such is the case if we try to figure out Durrell’s relationship to romanticism. On the one hand, he relies on Wordsworth to invoke the crucial issue of “persuad[ing] people to become their own contemporaries”106 by quoting the poet’s assertion: “Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be judged”.107 In that respect, Durrell’s interpretation of the meaning of poetry and of the poet’s role is strikingly ahead of its time, heralding the philosophic concerns voiced by Giorgio Agamben some sixty years later:

The poet, as a contemporary, is such a rift, he is the one who prevents time from merging and, simultaneously, the blood that must seal the wound.

The poet – the contemporary – must fix his gaze on his time. […] the contemporary is the one who fixes his gaze on his time in order to descry not light, but darkness.108

Yet, on the other hand, Durrell, keeps warning us against the dangers of the neo-romantic spirit, disparaging the vogue of “sentimental melancholy”109 and “surrender to immediate sensation”110 of the 1890s while praising in G. M.

Hopkins the combination of “the most daring verbal and intellectual skill with a strict discipline over form and emotion”,111 admiring in Spender and Day Lewis

“the romantic symbol […] renewed and controlled”112 or seeing in George Barker

104. Ibid., 100.

105. Ibid., 90.

106. Ibid., x.

107. Ibid., 7.

108. “Le poète, en tant que contemporain, est cette fracture, il est celui qui empêche le temps de se rassembler, et, en même temps, le sang qui doit souder la brisure. […] Le poète – le contemporain – doit fixer le regard sur son temps. […] le contemporain est celui qui fixe le regard sur son temps pour en percevoir non les lumières, mais l’obscurité” (Giorgio aGamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain ?, Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2008, 15-9, my translation).

109. Lawrence Lawrence durrell, Key to Modern Poetry, op. cit., 112.

110. Ibid., 117.

111. Ibid., 165.

112. Ibid., 184.

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