Introduction

Summary

At a particularly low moment at the end of August 1937, Samuel Beckett wrote to Mary Manning Howe describing his recent fallow period at home in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock after returning from an extended trip to Germany:

I do nothing, with as little shame as satisfaction. It is the state that suits me best. I write the odd poem when it is there, that is the only thing worth doing. There is an ecstasy of accidia – willless in a grey tumult of idées obscures. There is an end to the temptation of light, its polite scorchings & consolations.¹

Beckett’s emphasis here is the nothing he is doing, but it might as well have been the ‘odd poem’ that is the occasional product of his acedia. Throughout his life, Beckett only ever wrote odd poems. Odd in a triple sense: of occurring at irregular intervals; of their being formally unusual, sui generis, even while often inspired by historical forms; and in the sense of their being somehow in addition to, awkward for their lack of a clear relation to otherwise so praised a body of work – not ‘the bride herself’, but the ‘odd maid out’, as he put it in an early short story.² Beckett was also oddly protective of his poetry: when questions of the collation and republication of early works came as he found fame, it was only his poetry collection, Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), that he was really willing to see set in type again, this despite the little recognition it received the first time around, or since.³ From start to end, Beckett’s poetry remained an odd endeavour.