"The gantelope of sense and nonsense run": Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates in the 1930s

Abstract

With Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), Beckett published a poetry collection addressing a number of highly personal issues set in often distinctly Modernist, urban settings (Dublin, London, Paris). The poems offer idiosyncratic meeting points of words and allusions that seem to take their cues from the experimental poetry created by Dada and the surrealists, from Joyce, Eliot, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Goethe and Dante, as well as from two important Modernist ‘manifestoes’ (‘The Revolution of the Word’, 1929, and ‘Poetry is Vertical’, 1932). My article looks at pre-modernist and modernist intersections in Echo’s Bones. It discusses the overall composition of the collection as well as structure, lay-out and several interpretations of individual poems. It discusses how the Elizabethan author Edmund Spenser is referenced in Echo’s Bones, and how his presence might provide a significant key to understanding how Beckett establishes a political engagement with the recently founded Irish Free State (1922).