Providing one of the first book-length accounts of Samuel Beckett's poetry, this work demonstrates how Beckett's poetry reconfigures lyrical language, while also providing a new context for his experiments in poetic form and failure. Reading Beckett alongside nineteenth and twentieth century European poets such as Hoelderlin, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Montale, and Apollinaire, this book situates poetry in the triangulation of subjectivity, lyrical language, and human voice.

Beckett employs lyric tactics that range from deixis, parataxis, and caesura to specific kinds of voicing, muting, and punctuation, tactics this book analyses under the rubric of 'lyric failure'. Beckett uses these tactics to situate the human subject and the poem between life/death, event/non-event, beginning/ending, and more generally, expression/failure.

While offering a new way of reading Beckett's poetry beyond the usual comparisons with his prose and drama, this book also situates failure as a productive force that shapes literary form.