Poems and Shorter Writings

Book excerpt: This important collection brings together in one volume 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, which help us to understand the formative stages of Joyce's art; Giacomo Joyce, the fascinating Trieste notebook that Joyce compiled while finishing A portrait of the artist and beginning Ulysses; and the 1904 essay "A Portrait of the Artist," in which he first explored the world of his autobiographical novel. Assembled by the late Richard Ellmann, the leading Joyce scholar of his generation and with critical introductions and full annotations - by Professor A. Walton Litz and Dr. John Whittier-Ferguson, the whole collection contains much that will be unfamiliar to the student and the general reader.