Some great novelists have also been great or at least very good poets. Scott, Hardy, Meredith, D. H. Lawrence spring immediately to mind. Other novelists, like Dickens or E. M. Forster, scarcely attempted to write poetry at all—that is, if we discount the often intensely purple passages in their prose. Finally, a few novelists have tried to write poetry but have succeeded only incompletely or intermittently. It is to this last category that Lawrence Durrell must be assigned.

Durrell's reputation as a novelist, based chiefly on the Alexandria Quartet, remains firm, though it is beginning to weaken a little at the edges. Durrell's reputation as a poet, on the other hand, is virtually nonexistent. In 1959 Durrell complained in an interview that "as for poetry, I haven't much reputation in England and can't even persuade my publishers to risk a Collected Poems." A year later his publishers took the risk; and they took it again in 1968 and now in 1980 [with Collected Poems 1931–1974]. But in terms of Durrell's reputation the difference these collections have made is negligible.

The reason, I think, for this critical neglect lies in the too rigorous application of Durrell's novelistic virtues to his poetry, where they turn into vices. His streak of bittersweet sentimentality, his love for exotica in places and people, his ironic pirouettes, his name-dropping, his portrayal of complex characters over the long haul—all these work in the novels as they do not work in the poetry. On the contrary, they irritate by raising expectations which they only rarely satisfy. So, for example, the "Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels" (1947) arouses neither elegiac melancholy nor wicked joy—or anything really, other than the sad recollection of how differently a real poet like Villon handled similar situations.

Durrell's poetic is based on lines rather than on poems. He hopes for the "mantic line" in "Poggio" (1946) and "hunts" it in "Style" (1955). This poetic belongs to Dowson and to the early Yeats before the latter got it pounded out of him. This is why much of Durrell's poetry, despite the evident irony and sensuality and despite the frequent echoes of T. S. Eliot, has not yet entered the twentieth century. Too many poems end with punch lines, which is suitable for jokes but not for poetry. Too many poems originate—and end—in wordplays…. ["Song"] is ingenious, but it is ingenious in a way which leads nowhere. Ingenuity turns out to be not enough; it cannot take the place of inspiration.

Durrell's best verses are those which least conform to his own stated poetic, verses which do not pretend to be mantic and are content to be merely funny. His ballads of "Psychoanalysis" (1955), of "Kretschmer's Types" and of the "Oedipus Complex" (both 1960) cannot be termed serious poems; but then they are not bad poems either. They are, in fact, quite good light verse. W. H. Auden once observed that it is easier to be a good poet than to be a good novelist. The case of Lawrence Durrell does not seem to confirm this hypothesis. But then Auden was one of those poets who had never tried to write a novel.