Abstract/Summary

Giorgio Agamben’s claim that the criterion of poetry is the possibility of enjambment helps identify characteristic and deep ways that Beckett’s poems ‘impinge poetically’, particularly the explicitly performative and self-reflective effects they achieve through enjambment-based vacillation between ends and continuities. Conversely, Beckett’s poems help amend Agamben’s overly strong interpretation of the enjambment criterion. It should imply no more than that poetry’s existence depends on the possibility of an absence of lasting accord between sound and sense, and we should acknowledge that enjambment is equally possible for a line if it is preceded by another line. Agamben’s poetry criterion also offers fresh ways to think about the relation between Beckett’s poetry and prose, with implications for his later writings.