‘How I love the place, you have no idea’: Exploring Poetic Language in the Arab Quarter of The Alexandria Quartet

Studying the sense of place in British novelist Lawrence Durrell’s 1957-60 novel, The Alexandria Quartet, provides architects with insights into the poetic qualities shaping urban spaces. Durrell’s portrayal of novelized 1930s Alexandria aligns with the phenomenological understanding of place as a condition of consciousness in perception. This theoretical framework guides my paper on the 18th-century Arab quarter of Alexandria which involves a hermeneutical reading of British Lieutenant Joshua Scobie’s urban experience. The urban environment comes to life for Scobie through olfactory experiences, touching his emotions and reinforcing embodied engagement. These engagements are intimately tied to poetic (i.e., polysemic and metaphoric) language. For instance, the smell of bread in a street gives rise to poetic prose: “It smells like mother’s lap!” This sentence captures a moment when poetry emerges from a place by anchoring a feeling in place. In this context, Scobie’s journey conveys to architects that the feeling of being at home unfolds when architecture stimulates poetic emotions. Ultimately, poetic words are in our hands to make ourselves at home in the world.