Lyric failure : Samuel Beckett and poetic form

Failure is generative; it produces a form. The work of reading Beckett's poetry in this thesis is pledged to these singular acts of poetic form, which host complex and calamitous interactions between lyrical language, subjectivity, sound and the body. The ambition of this project is not limited to situating these formal measures in the context of modernist poetry or to address their neglect in Beckett studies, it is primarily to follow the rifts that Beckett's poetry opens between voice and writing, language and lack, desire and disaffectedness, futurity and stagnancy and, ultimately, life and death. The thesis argues that a chronological or a thematic analysis of Beckett's poetry is not helpful in explaining its aesthetic and political interventions, instead it is the various literary tactics, including specific kinds of voicing, muting and listening, where such an intervention resides. Divided in three chapters, namely 'Survival', 'Event' and 'End', the thesis reads poems from several phases of Beckett's career, his translations from French poetry and the poems of other relevant modernist poets, to discuss how these poems offer new imaginaries of both failure and form. Lyric, like the term 'failure', is used in this thesis in all its slipperiness, not as fixed frame of reference or a genre with an ideological totality, but as a prism through which form is at once constructed and destabilised. The promise of a Beckettian poem, this research contends, lies in demands it puts on poetic language, from staging failure to awaiting uncertain and indeterminate events to registering infinite beginnings. Following various gestures and disturbances of form in Beckett's poetry while tracing a broader relation between voice, sound, prosody and punctuation in poetic forms, this thesis provides a fresh context for reading his poetry and indicates the rewards that any such reading holds.