“Poetry is Vertical”: Samuel Beckett and the Vanguard Creativity

Abstract

In analysing the involvement of Samuel Beckett in the surrealism, evidenced by the signature, in 1932, of the manifesto “Poetry is vertical” and culminated in Murphy, the article attempts to rescue some traces of the Burke’s theory of sublime in avant-garde vision of creativity. The stress on the verticality subverts not only the disembodied experience of the sublime as known in the traditional aesthetics, but also insists on its reinterpretation in the context of psychoanalysis, allowing thus a reflection about the pleasure of the work of writing and the importance of the destruction for the creativity. Constituting a response to the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930), permeated by violence, and coinciding with the Freudian sublimation process redesign, in which happens to change not only the direction of the drive, but also its object, the manifest features as well the signature of Hans Arp, valorizing a discussion of the importance of the relationship between visual and verbal systems.