Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure

<b>Providing one of the first book-length accounts of Samuel Beckett's poetry this work illustrates how Beckett's poetry and its failures reconfigure the lyric form. Reading Beckett alongside nineteenth and twentieth century European poets such as Hölderlin Mallarmé Rimbaud Montale and Apollinaire the book situates failure in the triangulation of the lyric impulse subjectivity and the human voice.</b><br/><b><br/></b>Beckett in his poems employs lyric tactics that range from deixis parataxis and caesura to specific kinds of timbre resonances and punctuations. These tactics situate the poetic voice in the liminal points between life and death event and non-event beginning and ending and more broadly between expression and failure. The book frames these liminalities under the rubric of 'lyric failure'.<br/><br/>Moving beyond the usual comparisons with his prose and drama the study highlights failure as a generative force that structures Beckett's anti-expressive poetics.