El estatuto de la poesía en la ensayística de Samuel Beckett y T.S. Eliot

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot’s essays as instances of reflections upon their own poetry. Both poeticise the crisis of 19th-century language and literary forms in the context of world wars and think of the essay as the genre that allows them to build a conceptual framework related to art: what is the nature, the function and the status of poetic language and how poetry is conceived of in their poems, among other questions. However, the writers differ in how they approach essay writing: Beckett humorously and playfully explores the hybridity of the essay by drawing upon drama and poetry resources; Eliot, makes an instrumental use of his essay as the are subservient to his poetic production and he therefore does not experiment with his own essay writing. Thus, while for the latter poetry is presented is his essays as content to be theoreticized upon, for the former poetry becomes an object of experimentation.