La falta y el sesgo: los poemas de Samuel Beckett según Thomas Kinsella

Abstract

In the spring of 1993, Irish poet Thomas Kinsella (1928-2021) writes a commentary on Samuel Beckett’s poetry, published in the Journal of Beckett Studies. This commentary is shortly titled “Poems of Samuel Beckett” and it appears to serve the purpose of finding a common understanding of, and a closeness to, Irish literary tradition. Nevertheless, Kinsella’s findings turn out to be disappointing: from his point of view, there is an entire dimension “missing” in Beckett’s poetry. In this article we will seek to analyze Kinsella’s commentary and relocate it within its context of appearance, reading it as a possible dialogue between both authors. Our hypothesis sustains that Kinsella’s critique of Beckett’s poetics can be read as a strategy to re-position Beckett’s works towards the margins of national literature. According to Kinsella, there’s a “missing dimension” in Beckett’s poems, a consequence of his solipsistic uprotedness and incommunication. Nevertheless, as we approach those aspects of Beckett’s poetry which Kinsella deliberately decides not to take into account, we will be able to find that his analysis is bound by a biased point of view. Even more: once identified, that biased reading proves that there are more similarities between Kinsella’s and Beckett’s poetry than Kinsella himself is willing to acknowledge.