BECKETT, Samuel. Poems in English. London: John Calder. 1961.
8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket; pp. 53, [3]; spine tips and upper edges faded, spine, folds and upper edge of jacket showing some surface abrasion, previous owner's name neatly in ink to upper edge of front free endpaper; a very good copy, cloth and pages crisp and clean, in like wrapper.
An attractive copy of the volume which brought Beckett’s remarkable early poems back into print.
Samuel Beckett’s early poems, brought together for the first time in this slim, elegant volume, provide the seeds from which his writing in larger forms grew. 'Whoroscope', a poem 'written in English by an Irishman about a Frenchman, René Descartes' (Harvey), and author’s first published work, was composed as a last-minute entry for a poetry competition on the subject of time. (Harvey refers to 'the ironic préciosité of the correspondence between subject, title, and press'). It won first prize, which included publication as a 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 (there are endnotes à la The Waste Land), its punning title and acerbic wit only partially veiling its serious play with the intertwining themes.
'Whoroscope' is followed here by the thirteen-poem collection Echo's Bones, first 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 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 like Christopher Ricks have shown, Beckett was steeped in English poetry and drama (Ricks includes both early and late Beckett in his 1999 Oxford Book of English Verse.)
See Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic (1970); Wheatley (editor), Samuel Beckett: Selected Poems 1930-1988 (2009).
Federman & Fletcher 40.
SKU: 2125370