Echo’s Bones and Samuel Beckett’s Early Aesthetics: “The Vulture”, “Alba” and “Dortmunder” as Poetic Manifestos

Abstract

The present article is devoted to the exposition of Samuel Beckett’s aesthetics as formulated and exemplified in the key poems from Echo’s Bones: “The Vulture”, “Alba”, and “Dortmunder”. These texts emerge as poetic manifestos, in which Beckett explores the sources and materials of poetry, and addresses broader philosophical questions about poetry and art in general. Among his chief aesthetic concerns are the office of poetry vis-à-vis the human condition, as well as the efficacy of verbal magic, intimately connected with the possibility of artistic transcendence, or in other words, with the redemptive power of verbal art. These poems provide ample evidence that Beckett was already grappling with the notion of the (f)utility of art in a world filled with inevitable suffering and trying to formulate a poetic response to the pain and struggle of existence, while entertaining the possibility of redemption or transcendence through artistic creation and aesthetic contemplation. Especially “Alba” and “Dortmunder” seem to suggest that poetry or art momentarily eclipses the phenomenal world and offers a surrogate salvation, and an aesthetic experience emerges as a palliative to the anguish and turmoil of existence, two notions to which Beckett had remained faithful throughout his long literary career.