1 The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered (original) (raw)

What would it mean to consider James Joyce seriously as a poet? How do we evaluate Joyce's actual poetic production? And what relation does his poetry bear to his achievements in narrative? It has been over 100 years since scholarly assessments of Joyce's poetry began, with Arthur Symons's 1907 review of Chamber Music in the Nation. Yet the critical commentary on Joyce's poetry, and on Joyce's status as a poet, remains remarkably thin. The long-standing view of James Joyce as a poet is well expressed by Harry Levin in his 1941 James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, where he states: "Joyce at best is a merely competent poet, moving within an extremely limited range. The poetic medium, narrowly conceived, offers him too little resistance. It offers him a series of solfeggio exercises in preparation for his serious work. His real contribution is to bring the fuller resources of poetry to fiction" (27). This view, echoed throughout the canon of Joyce scholarship, carries two implications: that Joyce is essentially a failed, or at best limited, poet and that his poetry served as mere prolegomena to his great fiction, where his poetic gifts allow him to produce a kind of poetic achievement. Certainly Joyce's reputation rests on his great works in short fiction (Dubliners), novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), modern epic (Ulysses), and "vastest encyclopedia" (JJII 4) (the Wake). As a result, his formal poetic work-Chamber Music, the thirteen lyrics that make up Pomes Penyeach, and a collection of satiric and personal poems-has received scant scholarly attention, and there has been little effort to examine how this work might relate to Joyce's longer and more famous achievements.