The Fool by the Pool

Abstract

In 1934 Samuel Beckett announced that poems are written in the empty space between the poet and the world of objects, a world forever beyond the poet’s reach. Beckett used Yeats as an example of a modern poet facing this crisis, “the breakdown of the object”:

At the centre there is no theme. … And without a theme there can be no poem, as witness the exclamation of Mr. Yeats’s “fánatic heart”: “What, be a singer born and lack a theme!” (“The Winding Stair”). But the circumference is an iridescence of themes — Oisin, Cuchulain, Maeve ….¹