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Poems and Shorter Writings
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.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1937
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About the author
James Joyce
1,756 books9,591 followersJames Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum
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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.
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.
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.
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.
February 18, 2026
A real mixed bag. Joyce’s Chamber Music poems form a great sequence and some of the writings (particularly the A Portrait of the Artist essay) are interesting reads, but much of the rest of this isn’t. A lot of the poems are incomplete, and I don’t understand the use in publishing these, or drafts discarded by Joyce for being unworthy to publish. That said, the introductions included to these pieces are all excellent and scholarly, and often provide context which is more interesting than the pieces themselves. Therefore, unless you’re a scholar of Joyce or just his biggest fan, I would probably just pick up a copy of Chamber Music by itself and leave it at that.
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
April 21, 2013
некоторые вещи лучше делать на мебельной фабрике (с)... то есть, никогда не публиковать, конечно
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews