Book contents
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chronology of Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Chapter 1 Weirdness and Dislocation in Beckett’s Early Poetry
- Chapter 2 Whole Fragments
- Chapter 3 Pre-echoing the Bones
- Chapter 4 ‘The Nucleus of a Living Poetic’
- Chapter 5 Beckett Growing Gnomic
- Chapter 6 Gender, Pronoun and Subject in ‘Poèmes 1937–1939’
- Chapter 7 The Missing Poème
- Chapter 8 Romanticism and Beckett’s Poetry
- 9 Romance under Strain in ‘Cascando’
- Chapter 10 Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translated Poems
- Chapter 11 Samuel Beckett’s Translations of Mexican Poetry
- Chapter 12 Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead
- Chapter 13 Beckett’s Sound Sense
- Chapter 14 The Matter of Absence
- Chapter 15 ‘Mocked by a Tissue That May Not Serve’
- Chapter 16 Invoking Beckett
- Index
Chapter 12 - Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2022
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chronology of Samuel Beckett’s Poetry
- Chapter 1 Weirdness and Dislocation in Beckett’s Early Poetry
- Chapter 2 Whole Fragments
- Chapter 3 Pre-echoing the Bones
- Chapter 4 ‘The Nucleus of a Living Poetic’
- Chapter 5 Beckett Growing Gnomic
- Chapter 6 Gender, Pronoun and Subject in ‘Poèmes 1937–1939’
- Chapter 7 The Missing Poème
- Chapter 8 Romanticism and Beckett’s Poetry
- 9 Romance under Strain in ‘Cascando’
- Chapter 10 Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translated Poems
- Chapter 11 Samuel Beckett’s Translations of Mexican Poetry
- Chapter 12 Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead
- Chapter 13 Beckett’s Sound Sense
- Chapter 14 The Matter of Absence
- Chapter 15 ‘Mocked by a Tissue That May Not Serve’
- Chapter 16 Invoking Beckett
- Index
Summary
Beckett’s poetry is striking in its intensity and force, and over his long career it twists around the erotic, desiring, remembering voice, locked into relations with absent objects of passion and feeling. The poems seem resolutely apolitical, lacking context beyond eerie empty references of place name and time frame. I will be reading them as shaped according to surrealist, existential and phenomenological abstractedness, and as shadowing Becket’s oblique experience of the war dead. Beginning with close readings of the pre-war poems and translations, I will move on to ‘Saint-Lô’ and the mirlitonnades to explore the absent presence of the war dead as haunting the spectral voices – familial, erotic, elegiac – of the poems. The chapter will explore the deep morbidity of Beckett’s encounters with the doubled mirror image and relate this to the inaccessible spectral other supposed by lyric language, and the erased trace of the dead of the Second World War. The poems occupy an abstract Mallarméan néant which shapes the way the dead are experienced, concealing the shades of the war dead who haunt the texts at radical remove.1
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- Samuel Beckett's Poetry , pp. 189 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022