Word: beckett
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Collected Poems is Beckett's second work of poetry, but it is actually three literary works in one. First, it represents all Beckett's poetry in English including what was published previously in the short volume Poems in English. Second, it represents a complete collection of Beckett's poems in French. A dozen of these, written in 1938 and 1939, comprise Beckett's first creative work in that language. (For three of these Beckett has provided English translations.) Finally, Collected Poems includes Beckett's translations from the French of such poets as Paul Eluard, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire--also...
...reader unfamiliar with Beckett's frame of mind and uninitiated to his subject matter reading his poetry would be akin to being hit over the head with a sledge hammer; that is, you wouldn't know what hit you but you'd know for damn sure it hit hard. The effect of Beckett's poems upon the first-time reader is one of power even if one doesn't understand what the subject matter is or what Beckett is trying...
...poet this is a supreme compliment. It implies an ability to move the reader by sheer merits of style, by the sheer force of the words and their arrangement on the page. These two stanzas from the 1936 poem "Cascado" are forceful and by necessity, that is Beckett's necessity, sufficiently cryptic...
...course Beckett the absurdist, the existentialist does come through in his style. Many lines in "Echo's Bones" and "Malacoda" remind us of that airy, disjointed dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Beckett's poems are filled with much of the same choppy, incomplete, grammarless phrases that characterize his prose and dialogues. Yet there is still that cryptic element...
...expected that when a novelist-playwright like Beckett, whose subject matter deals with lack of communication and absurdity, turns to poetry, his already intense style will seem exaggerated. We are not surprised when we find that Beckett has written only a handful of poems because we know the intensity of feeling each must contain when only one, sometimes two, are produced in a year. In the same way we should not be surprised by Beckett's somewhat exaggerated poetic style...