Beckett's Early Verse and the Modernist Long Poem: A Study of ‘Enueg I’

Abstract

The premise of the article is the contention that Beckett studies have been focused too much on the philosophical, cultural and psychological dimensions of his established canon, at the expense of the artistry. That research on Beckett's work is issue-driven rather than otherwise, and the slender extant body of criticism specifically on his poetic achievements bears no comparison with the massive exploration of the other facets of Beckett's artistic activity. The critical neglect of Beckett's poetry may not be commensurate with the quality of his verse. And it is in the spirit of remedying this oversight that the present article is offered, focusing on ‘Enueg I’, a representative poem from Echo's Bones, which exhibits all the salient features of Beckett's early poetry. It is argued that Beckett's early verse display the twofold influence, that of the transatlantic Modernism of Eliot and Pound, and of French poetry, specifically the visionary and experimental works of Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the surrealists. Furthermore, the article also demonstrates that ‘Enueg I’ testifies to Beckett's ambition to compose a complex long Modernist poem in the vein of The Waste Land or The Cantos. Beckett's ‘Enueg I’ has much in common with Eliot's exemplary disjunctive Modernist long poem. Both poems are premised on the acutely felt cultural crisis and display the similar tenor in their ending. Finally, they both close with the vision of the doomed and paralyzed world, and the prevalent sense of sterility and dissolution. In the subsequent analysis, which takes up the bulk of the article, careful attention is paid to the patterning of the verbal material, including also the most fundamental level, that of the arrangements of phonemes, with a view to uncovering the underlying network of sound patterns, which contributes decisively to the semantic dimension of the poem.