FRENCH LETTERS ;)

Are novelists nicer than poets?   Could it be a rough truth that poets are egotists who write mainly about themselves, whereas novelists diffuse their personalities and are therefore more familiar with the action of sympathy?   "I'm as self-centred as children and invalids" Baudelaire writes, and later to the second empire beauty  Apollonie Sabatier 'I am an egotist and I use you".
Phillip Larkin used to say that he gave up fiction for poetry because he stopped being interested in other people.   On the other hand, perhaps a novelist's egotism is just as great, but expressed less raucously; while 'being interested' in other people' can turn into a frigid and parasitical activity.   Novelists can also diffuse themselves so much that they cease to be there; V.S. Pritchett remarked on what boring company novelists are because they're always half-listening to the next conversation and  half-thinking about their own work.   At least with a poet you know where you are.

Comments about BAUDELAIRE & FLAUBERT (Famous French writers) taken from a book called SOMETHING TO DECLARE byJulian Barnes