The late flowering of Samuel Beckett’s true talent for poetry

 
Samuel Beckett
David Sexton2 August 2012

The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett
Edited by Sean Lawlor and John Pilling
(Faber, £30)

Samuel Beckett’s poetry is the least rewarding part of his work. Peggy Guggenheim, remembering her brief affair with Beckett in the Thirties in her autobiography, says flatly: “I thought his poems were bad.”

John Pilling, one of the editors of this new, and admirable, annotated scholarly edition, said on a previous occasion that there is no point in pretending Beckett is a great poet. The poetry is mainly useful as “a potential clarifier of his more serious work in other genres”, he suggested.

Even in their introduction now, the editors are forced to admit that Beckett may have overvalued his poems. The truth is that the arcane and overworked poems Beckett wrote and published before the war would have no life now were it not for his later writing. Nor are his poetry translations independently vital.

Yet the mostly tiny, simple, inward verses he wrote later in life, which he called “mirlitonnades”, French for a child’s trumpet, are treasurable. In just a few plain, unpunctuated words, they capture movements of the spirit.

In a way, the first of these dates all the way back to his affair with Peggy Guggenheim in 1938: “They come/ different and the same/ with each it is different and the same/ with each the absence of love is different/ with each the absence of love is the same.” That’s a particular truth perceived and abstracted unforgettably.

A lovely one of these late micro-poems is an epitaph that answers the line from Petruchio’s song in The Taming of the Shrew (seized upon by Cole Porter), “Where is the life that late I led?”: “there/ the life late led/ down there/ all done unsaid”. It’s perfect Beckett, miniature but complete. Say it again slowly.

Then again, his concentrated versions of aphorisms by Chamfort are works of genius too. Chamfort wrote (in French): “When someone maintains that it is the least sensitive people who are, taking everything into account, the happiest, I recall the Indian proverb: ‘It’s better to be seated than standing, laying down than seated, dead than all that’.”

Beckett trenchantly recast this into a single couplet, cancelling the introductory context, turning it into an outright rule: “Better on your arse than on your feet,/ Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.” What better counsel in so few words?

And Beckett’s very last written work, “what is the word” (which I had the pleasure of publishing first in this country, in another paper, selected subsequently by Christopher Ricks for his Oxford Anthology of English Verse), is, in its enactment of hesitancy and persistence, its conveyance of a mind at its limit, surely great poetry, after all: “folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what — /what -/what is the word”.

When he so deliberately composed his early poems, Beckett falsified himself. When he abandoned all that, the poetry came true.

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