BECKETT, Samuel. Poems in English. London: John Calder. 1961.
8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper; pp. 53, [3]; spine tips a little rubbed, minor bump to upper spine tip of cloth and wrapper; a very near fine copy, cloth and pages crisp and clean, in like wrapper.
An uncommonly sharp copy of the volume which brought Beckett’s remarkable early poems back into print.
Samuel Beckett’s early poems, together for the first time in this slim, elegant volume, can be seen as providing the seeds or essence out of which the later writing in larger forms would grow. “Whoroscope”, a poem “written in English by an Irishman about a Frenchman, René Descartes” (Harvey), was the author’s first published work, composed last-minute as an entry for a competition of poems on the subject of time. (Harvey refers to “the ironic préciosité of the correspondence between subject, title, and press”). It won the first prize and subsequently published as an elegant chapbook by Nancy Cunard at The Hours Press. The poem, “spoken” by Descartes (employed by Queen Christina of Sweden to teach her philosophy) is dense with learning, and indeed sends up its learning – it includes a series of endnotes à la The Waste Land – the punning title and acerbic wit only partially veiling its serious play with the intertwining themes.
This is followed by the thirteen-poem collection Echo's Bones, published in 1935 by George Reavey's Paris-based Europa Press. David Wheatley notes that although “Beckett refused to authorise a reprint of [his early stories] More Pricks than Kicks until 1970, he was happy in later life to keep the poems of Echo's Bones in print; to Hugh Kenner, they seemed the only part of his early work for which Beckett still cared.”
The volume concludes with two lightly later poems (“Cascando” and “Sâint-Lo”) and four poems in French with Beckett’s own English versions on facing pages. The jacket boldly asserts that “with this collection, Beckett takes his rightful place in the mainstream of English poetry”, which may seem like overstatement, but, as critics such as Christopher Ricks have shown, Beckett was steeped in English poetry and drama (indeed, Ricks includes both early and late Beckett in his canonical 1999 Oxford Book of English Verse.)
Federman & Fletcher 40.
SKU: 2123461