ABSTRACT
This from Whoroscope [15, 105-6, 150], Beckett's first non-academic publication: a poem on the life of Descartes, for which Beckett provided footnotes of dubious helpfulness (the note for these lines reads 'He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians' (CP 5)). With patience, the early poems can be decoded; they are full of autobiographical references (Beckett's intimate knowledge of Dublin and London are reflected in the wanderings described in Saines 1 and Serena 1); they display the young Beckett's intimate knowledge of other poetic forms (the associative free verse employed by contemporary French poets; medieval troubadour poetry, after whose forms many of the poems are named). Some show an embryonic gift for lyrical expression ('Alba', the poem written for Ethna McCarthy; 'Da Tagte Es', the poem written after his father's death); but, in others, this gift is all but stifled by the self-conscious obscurity that also marred Beckett's first experiments in prose.
