‘The Poetry is Another Pair of Sleeves’: Beckett, Ireland and Modernist Lyric Poetry *

Patricia Coughlan focuses on Beckett's earlier work, which others have tended to neglect; she explores its social and ideological context, in Beckett's reactions to Ireland in the 1930s; and she sets it in the literary context of both Irish and European modernism. Referring to his essay on 'Recent Irish Poetry', now considered as a modernist manifesto, she distinguishes the modernism of Beckett and Joyce from the myth-making and the totalizing aesthetic of Yeats and Eliot. The nature of subjectivity is necessarily a central preoccupation of lyric poets, being the ground whereon lyric is built. The poems up to and including Echo's Bones are also full of often bewildering allusions: Dantean, biblical, Greek mythological, and orientalizing. The psychological origins of the poems, so far as they are capable of being discussed, are in any case evidently much more complex and dialectical than McMillan allows.