Samuel Beckett, poetry of the impossible

“In my beginning is my end”, T.S. Eliot

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s poetic writing presents a strange perception of time, of the space, of the real and also, a mistrust in the subject and in the language. The human word cannot account for all that, that is why silence, fragment, babble, are the poet’s resources to make use of language, which is an inadequate way of communication, since its effectiveness lies in its shortage. This distrust in language begins in modernity and is accentuated in postmodernity. Philosophers and poets share the idea that words awaken perceptions of the some part of the real; most of that is silence. Beckett intuited what philosophers discovered: the impossibility of going further with language. The human condition of a fragmented self can only perceive the fragmented real. All these concerns are found in Beckett’s poems, which we aim to analyze.