Beckett’s “Imbedded Poetry” and the Challenge to Verse Drama

The aim of this article is to read Beckett’s “imbedded poetry” in conversation with his plays; both will be considered from an epigenetic perspective focused on three specific editions of Beckett’s poems. This reading starts by considering Beckett’s early approach to poetry; it then examines Who May Tell The Tale, a lyric included in Watt’s Addenda and renamed Tailpiece in the Faber edition of Beckett’s Selected Poems 1930-1988 (2009), where it is significantly placed at the end of the volume. In this perspective the poem, which originally featured as an ambiguous epilogue to Beckett’s postwar novel, invites new considerations on Beckett’s postwar turn towards theatre, especially with reference to Waiting for Godot. Similarly, Age is when to a man (retitled Song in the Faber edition) is extrapolated from the dramatic original context of Words and Music (1961) and relocated in almost every collection of Beckett’s poems, acting both as a commentary on the radioplay’s basic movement between language and sound and as an inquiry into the core of the image. Caught in the interplay between drama and poetry, poetic utterance and musical pause, Beckett’s characters are bound to a restless longing for meaning.The third issue is Rockaby (1980), a play included as a poem in Einaudi’s Italian edition Le poesie (2006), edited by Gabriele Frasca, an editorial choice which rekindles the voice as the most enigmatic feature of Beckett’s work. Ultimately What is the Word –Beckett’s last poem and his veritable ‘tailpiece’ –will be explored considering What Where. These examples interrogate the inherent intermediality of Beckett’s work, a problematic “undoing” (Gontarski 1985) which is at the same time an aesthetic necessity and an act of resistance against “the neatness of identifications”.