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...