What happens when you take an intensely intelligent young man, overcome with grief at the loss of his father, obsessed with Dante, and in possession of a decent sense of humour? The poem ‘Malacoda’, of course.

First published in 1935 as part of Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, the poem is, like Beckett’s other verse, not a patch on his prose and drama, but the web of references and biting cadences have a kind of strange beauty to them.

‘Malacoda’ is the chief demon of Dante’s Inferno, appearing in Canto XXI.