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Poems and shorter writings: Including Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and 'A Portrait of the artist'
This collection brings together all the poems published by James Joyce in his lifetime, most notably "Chamber Music" and "Pomes Penyeach". It also includes a large body of his satiric or humorous occasional verse, much of which is fugitive and little known to the general reader. In addition, the volume provides the text of the surviving prose "Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce" - the fascinating Trieste notebook that Joyce compiled while finishing "A Portrait of the Artist" and beginning "Ulysses", in which he first explored the world of his autobiographical novel.
300 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1937
3 people are currently reading
176 people want to read
About the author
James Joyce
1,914 books9,312 followersA profound influence of literary innovations of Irish writer James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on modern fiction includes his works,
Ulysses
(1922) and
Finnegans Wake
(1939).
Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on When We Dead Awaken , play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music .
At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.
In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on When We Dead Awaken , play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music .
At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.
In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
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December 6, 2015Epiphany: a moment of sudden revelation or insight, from the Greek word epiphainein meaning reveal.
When I got to the middle of this book*, I had an epiphany. My epiphany concerns the realisation that Joyce and Proust had a lot more in common than I thought. I don’t read much (hardly any) literary criticism so when an idea that may have been obvious to others strikes me, it really is like a revelation. I had a feeling that these two contemporaries had a little more in common than one banal dinner at the Ritz and the shared and silent taxi ride so often commented on, but it was exciting to find out just how much. In the middle of this volume, placed precisely between the poems and the prose, are forty short pieces (all that remain of a collection of seventy), mostly written in Joyce’s youth. He described these pieces as a sudden spiritual manifestation...the most delicate and evanescent of moments, and he recorded them carefully. These moments only became epiphanies (his word) later when their full potential was realised by being incorporated into his work.
Proust too, even as a young boy, found himself compelled to record such spiritual manifestations, one of which became a key element in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: the alternating view of the steeples of a distant church seen from a carraige as it made its way along a winding road. The insight he gained from recording the sight of the steeples appearing and disappearing around the bend of the road was of huge significance to his future as a writer and he refers to it several times in the Recherche. As the years went on, he filled his notebooks with more such epiphanies and they became the foundation for his entire work. It is extraordinary to think of these two contemporaries, although living in very different worlds, feeling their way towards their writing destinies in such a similar way.
....................................................................................................
The other big surprise in this collection - at least for me - is the short text called Giacomo Joyce, which Joyce penned during his years in Trieste, sometime between 1911 and 1915, a time during which he was completing A portrait of the Artist and beginning Ulysses.
It is written in the first person and refers to the narrator as Jamesy and Jem, also mentioning a wife called Nora, so it feels very autobiographical. It is composed of fifty fragments and bears comparison to Dante’s Vita Nuova, a short book of about thirty poems linked by explanatory sections. In the Vita Nuova, Dante pours over his love for Beatrice whom he would only ever love from a distance. Giacomo Joyce concerns a similar obsessive love for a girl** glimpsed from afar. Afar is relative though. Unlike Dante who mostly only glimpsed Beatrice on the street or in a large gathering, Giacomo’s object of desire is a pupil in one of his English classes so he sees her daily for a period, listens for the sound of her high heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs, looks out for her in the street, at the opera, or out tobogganing with her father*** on a hillside.
And when next she doth ride abroad
May I be there to see!****
Half way through the fragments, the narrator compares her to Beatrice, confirming the parallel with Dante's spiritual love:
She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls...So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice..
But this is Joyce, and his Beatrice is called on to play a more earthly role in the boudoirs of his imagination before the end.
I began this piece with a comparison to Proust so it is fitting to end in the same way: the theme of obsessive love for the inaccessible object of desire is one of the cornerstones of his work: Gilberte, Odette, the Duchess de Guermantes, Albertine, all obsessed over but never actually possessed. And that theme takes me back to another book I read recently, Goëthe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. My reading life is like an endless circle.
*This collection gathers together 'Youthful Poems' c.1900, 'Chamber Music Cycle' 1902, 'Chamber Music' 1907, 'Occasional Poems' ?, Pomes Peneach 1927, 'Ecce Piuer' 1932 plus miscellaneous prose pieces.
**Amalia Popper, a pupil in Joyce's English language class in Trieste. One of the poems in Pomes Penyeach, 'Nightpiece' also refers to Amalia Popper and echoes the Tristan and Isolde section of Finnegans Wake which Joyce was writing in Trieste around the time he wrote the poem.
***The girl’s father, Leopold Popper, according to the notes may have been a model for Leopold Bloom.
****A line from William Cowper.
When I got to the middle of this book*, I had an epiphany. My epiphany concerns the realisation that Joyce and Proust had a lot more in common than I thought. I don’t read much (hardly any) literary criticism so when an idea that may have been obvious to others strikes me, it really is like a revelation. I had a feeling that these two contemporaries had a little more in common than one banal dinner at the Ritz and the shared and silent taxi ride so often commented on, but it was exciting to find out just how much. In the middle of this volume, placed precisely between the poems and the prose, are forty short pieces (all that remain of a collection of seventy), mostly written in Joyce’s youth. He described these pieces as a sudden spiritual manifestation...the most delicate and evanescent of moments, and he recorded them carefully. These moments only became epiphanies (his word) later when their full potential was realised by being incorporated into his work.
Proust too, even as a young boy, found himself compelled to record such spiritual manifestations, one of which became a key element in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: the alternating view of the steeples of a distant church seen from a carraige as it made its way along a winding road. The insight he gained from recording the sight of the steeples appearing and disappearing around the bend of the road was of huge significance to his future as a writer and he refers to it several times in the Recherche. As the years went on, he filled his notebooks with more such epiphanies and they became the foundation for his entire work. It is extraordinary to think of these two contemporaries, although living in very different worlds, feeling their way towards their writing destinies in such a similar way.
....................................................................................................
The other big surprise in this collection - at least for me - is the short text called Giacomo Joyce, which Joyce penned during his years in Trieste, sometime between 1911 and 1915, a time during which he was completing A portrait of the Artist and beginning Ulysses.
It is written in the first person and refers to the narrator as Jamesy and Jem, also mentioning a wife called Nora, so it feels very autobiographical. It is composed of fifty fragments and bears comparison to Dante’s Vita Nuova, a short book of about thirty poems linked by explanatory sections. In the Vita Nuova, Dante pours over his love for Beatrice whom he would only ever love from a distance. Giacomo Joyce concerns a similar obsessive love for a girl** glimpsed from afar. Afar is relative though. Unlike Dante who mostly only glimpsed Beatrice on the street or in a large gathering, Giacomo’s object of desire is a pupil in one of his English classes so he sees her daily for a period, listens for the sound of her high heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs, looks out for her in the street, at the opera, or out tobogganing with her father*** on a hillside.
And when next she doth ride abroad
May I be there to see!****
Half way through the fragments, the narrator compares her to Beatrice, confirming the parallel with Dante's spiritual love:
She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls...So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice..
But this is Joyce, and his Beatrice is called on to play a more earthly role in the boudoirs of his imagination before the end.
I began this piece with a comparison to Proust so it is fitting to end in the same way: the theme of obsessive love for the inaccessible object of desire is one of the cornerstones of his work: Gilberte, Odette, the Duchess de Guermantes, Albertine, all obsessed over but never actually possessed. And that theme takes me back to another book I read recently, Goëthe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. My reading life is like an endless circle.
*This collection gathers together 'Youthful Poems' c.1900, 'Chamber Music Cycle' 1902, 'Chamber Music' 1907, 'Occasional Poems' ?, Pomes Peneach 1927, 'Ecce Piuer' 1932 plus miscellaneous prose pieces.
**Amalia Popper, a pupil in Joyce's English language class in Trieste. One of the poems in Pomes Penyeach, 'Nightpiece' also refers to Amalia Popper and echoes the Tristan and Isolde section of Finnegans Wake which Joyce was writing in Trieste around the time he wrote the poem.
***The girl’s father, Leopold Popper, according to the notes may have been a model for Leopold Bloom.
****A line from William Cowper.
June 27, 2023
Joyce is a literary genius, without a shadow of a doubt; but several pages of limericks gave me a headache 🌝
I wish he was as experimental in poetry as he was in prose.
I wish he was as experimental in poetry as he was in prose.
February 6, 2018
The beginning of this book is really good, all of his first poems are very soft and very sweet, but the rest are literally garbage. Every poem is exactly the same. Two rhyming couplets over, and over, and over again. Plus, the last third of the book was just random bits of dialogue with him and other people, about nothing??????? It’s better as a coffee table book that you just read the beginning of.
May 22, 2012
I didn't actually enjoy this. The early poems just to wan and fey and I was lost to the rest of the writings
January 12, 2025
This book deserves all praise simply because it includes the "Epiphanies" and "Giacomo Joyce." The first are Joyces first record of the telling moments ("telling" is too weak; "revelatory" might be better if it weren't overused) that would come back in later work. Some of them are very short, and some don't seem particularly special. But that says nothing about the resonance they would have in the mind of the author. We all must have these moments that stick with us, although anyone outside might think they were banal. I used these in a graduate class on "The Prose Poem and the Very Short Story" many years ago in the Michigan writing program. I loved them, but I'm not sure I was able to communicate that love to any of the students.
"Giacomo Joyce" is a beautiful erotic piece that JJ wrote while working on "Ulysses." It is told in fragments, and jumps around in the mind (like the infamous stream-of-consciousness" in the big book). He puts in his languages and often very obscure references, which he was wont to do. But the language is often gorgeous, and the feeling he creates, of an illicit but consuming love affair with a younger woman, is palpable. It is striking.
The poems are growing on me the more often I return to them. It helps to think of the "Chamber Music" poems as song lyrics, because that is how he imagined them. I also found a bizarre moment of humor, thinking of them as poems for "the chamber" -- and we all know Joyce's mind would have gone there too. The Occasional poems from later in his life were also interesting, mostly because they indicated JJ still needed to return to that genre even while he was writing the prose that would remake our idea of fiction.
Extensive notes, often unnecessary, but when they are illuminating, they are very helpful.
"Giacomo Joyce" is a beautiful erotic piece that JJ wrote while working on "Ulysses." It is told in fragments, and jumps around in the mind (like the infamous stream-of-consciousness" in the big book). He puts in his languages and often very obscure references, which he was wont to do. But the language is often gorgeous, and the feeling he creates, of an illicit but consuming love affair with a younger woman, is palpable. It is striking.
The poems are growing on me the more often I return to them. It helps to think of the "Chamber Music" poems as song lyrics, because that is how he imagined them. I also found a bizarre moment of humor, thinking of them as poems for "the chamber" -- and we all know Joyce's mind would have gone there too. The Occasional poems from later in his life were also interesting, mostly because they indicated JJ still needed to return to that genre even while he was writing the prose that would remake our idea of fiction.
Extensive notes, often unnecessary, but when they are illuminating, they are very helpful.
August 13, 2022
Read this alongside J C C Mays' "Poems and 'Exiles'" (Penguin).
This has content that is only available in much more expensive academic/university press publications. And, because it was being published at the same time as "P&E", content the Joyce estate did not allow to be reprinted there. Elllman and F&F had a close relationship weith Joyce, and the Joyce estate.
But, the "P&E" Notes by Mays are MUCH better, and much more extensive.
So, get 'em both and dive in!
May be for Joyce "completists" only. A lot of otherwise uncollected limericks and such. Fun, ephmeral, and not really necessary to understanding his major works. But his take on Eliot that he sent to Pound may be worth the price of the book.
This has content that is only available in much more expensive academic/university press publications. And, because it was being published at the same time as "P&E", content the Joyce estate did not allow to be reprinted there. Elllman and F&F had a close relationship weith Joyce, and the Joyce estate.
But, the "P&E" Notes by Mays are MUCH better, and much more extensive.
So, get 'em both and dive in!
May be for Joyce "completists" only. A lot of otherwise uncollected limericks and such. Fun, ephmeral, and not really necessary to understanding his major works. But his take on Eliot that he sent to Pound may be worth the price of the book.
May 13, 2021
Having read a fair bit of Joyce now I finally got around to seeking out his poetry. The one poem I did know, She Weeps Over Rahoon, remains a favourite and probably the best of Joyce’s poetry. The book contains many of his limericks which are entertaining, but I think the Epiphanies are real jewels of volume.
March 17, 2022
The poems are really not up to much, worthwhile only for understanding his development, but Giacomo Joyce is formally interesting and sultry
June 16, 2023
happy bloomsday everybody
March 16, 2024
3.5 - honestly a bit forgettable compared to his prose
June 17, 2021
A most interesting book. First half of these collected writings are his poems. The second half comprises Joyce’s Epiphanies, his first essay entitled A Portrait of an Artist, and his abandoned novel, Giacomo Joyce. I often found the introductory material more confusing than Joyce’s own words. Glad to have read the autobiographical novel of Portrait because the essay is extremely confusing. It seems more like the ramblings of a precocious but disordered thinker. Ellman and, to some degree, his successor editors do demonstrate how Joyce reworked much of the material in the shorter writings into his major works.
June 3, 2011
токо джакомо
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July 20, 2025Of course, there are some great poems in here. But on the whole a bit of a disappointment. Too much limerick and comic stuff for me. Nevertheless good to get to know this side of Joyce.
April 21, 2013
некоторые вещи лучше делать на мебельной фабрике (с)... то есть, никогда не публиковать, конечно
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews