The Spasmodic Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett’s Poetry

Abstract The spasmodic aesthetics of Samuel Beckett’s poetry tap into the automaticity of the fleshly machine, i.e., body, and can best be described in his own words as “the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.” Whether it is a poetics of dehiscence, rectal cavities, or muscular spasms, Beckett’s verse stays moored to the heady operations of the body—tics, twitches, nervous contractions, and stutters—that stay equally impervious to thought and emotion. His poetry is “the work of the abscess”—a work that, in its drive toward inexorability, appears to sidestep the questions of intelligibility and direct affective engagement.