Samuel Beckett's Poetry

✍ Scribed by James Brophy (editor), William Davies (editor)

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 288
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Odd Poem - Samuel Beckett's Poetry
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Chronology of Samuel Beckett's Poetry
Chapter 1 Weirdness and Dislocation in Beckett's Early Poetry
Chapter 2 Whole Fragments: Beckett and Modernist Poetics
First Stirrings
Troubadour Modernism
The Two Albas of Echo's Bones
Modernism and Orientalism
Conclusion
Chapter 3 Pre-echoing the Bones: Samuel Beckett's Early Poems and Translations as Transpositions
Transposition in Poetry
Jazz in Transposition
Chapter 4 'The Nucleus of a Living Poetic': Samuel Beckett and His Irish Contemporaries
The Nucleus
A Living Poetic
Ethna MacCarthy
Contemporaries
Chapter 5 Beckett Growing Gnomic: The Poems of 1934
Chapter 6 Gender, Pronoun and Subject in 'Poèmes 1937-1939'
Chapter 7 The Missing Poème: Beckett's fêtes galantes
Chapter 8 Romanticism and Beckett's Poetry
Introduction
'Beckett, Whom No One Would Call Romantic'
Beckett's Romantic Tradition: Inherited, Invented, Negated
Negative Romanticism
9 Romance under Strain in 'Cascando'
I.
II.
III.
Chapter 10 Samuel Beckett's Self-Translated Poems
Introduction: 'poetry by definition is untranslatable'
The Thirties and Forties: From Modernist Multilingualism to Self-Translation
From the Fifties to the Eighties: Eschewing Bilingualism
Translating the 1948 Poems
Conclusion: An Art of Paradoxes
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
'world world world world': Harmonious Disharmony
Ill Seen, Ill Said, Ill Heard
Chapter 14 The Matter of Absence: The Manuscripts of Beckett's Late Poems
Thither: Creating Presence
There: Present Absences
Thence: Creating Absence
Envoi
Chapter 15 'Mocked by a Tissue That May Not Serve': Beckett and the Poetics of Embodiment
Chapter 16 Invoking Beckett: Samuel Beckett's Legacy in Northern Irish Poetry
Beckett in Ireland: Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon
Beckett in Paris: Padraic Fiacc and Leontia Flynn
Conclusion: Beckett in Northern Ireland
Index