Abstract
Beckett was unusually forthcoming in his professions of enthusiasm for the work of Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer and Beckett were cognate minds on issues such as the ubiquitous miseries of existence, their shared convictions regarding aesthetic questions is no less demonstrable. This essay examines Beckett's critical reflections on the work of Irish artists in relation to core precepts of Schopenhauer's philosophy. It seeks to show how the hermeneutical strategies employed by Beckett in texts such as ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934), ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’ (1938), and ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’ (1945) are of a piece with Schopenhauer's assertions regarding the phenomenological processes of artistic composition and appreciation. In revealing the conceptual underpinnings of Beckett's evaluative criteria and their correlations with central principles of Schopenhauer's thought, this reading aims to enhance our understanding of Beckett's commitment to views of the irreducibility of the aesthetic.
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