Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure

Providing one of the first book-length accounts of Samuel Beckett's poetry, this work illustrates how Beckett's poetry, and its failures, reconfigure the lyric form. Reading Beckett alongside nineteenth and twentieth century European poets such as Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Montale, and Apollinaire, the book situates failure in the triangulation of the lyric impulse, subjectivity, and the human voice.

Beckett, in his poems, employs lyric tactics that range from deixis, parataxis, and caesura to specific kinds of timbre, resonances, and punctuations. These tactics situate the poetic voice in the liminal points between life and death, event and non-event, beginning and ending, and more broadly, between expression and failure. The book frames these liminalities under the rubric of 'lyric failure'.

Moving beyond the usual comparisons with his prose and drama, the study highlights failure as a generative force that structures Beckett's anti-expressive poetics.

Author: Mantra Mukim
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 03/06/2025
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics
Pages: 256
Weight: 1.17lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9781350464186