Samuel Beckett' s early poems, which represent an important moment in his artistic development, are a surprisingly neglected field for research. No doubt many readers are put off by their dazzling erudition, which can blind the reader to quite what it is the poems are intending to say. The availability of Beckett's notebooks and his correspondence with friends such as Thomas MacGreevy are a considerable aid in tracing his intellectual development and the ways in which this is applied in his writing in the early thirties. It is apparent that for someone as bookish as Beckett, self-expression was enabled by reference to what he valued in his wide reading. This thesis, therefore, seeks to identify as fully as possible the intertextual allusions in the early poems; discuss the way these allusions influence the ways we read Beckett's texts; and how ideas about women and sexuality influence the choice of material incorporated in the poems.