Joyce, James - Herbert Howarth (essay date 1966)

Herbert Howarth (essay date 1966)

SOURCE: "Chamber Music and its Place in the Joyce Canon," in James Joyce Today: Essays on the Major Works, edited by Thomas F. Staley, Indiana University Press, 1966, pp. 11-27.

[In the following essay, Howarth traces the development of Joyce's lyricism, concluding that the imagery, form, and themes of the poems in Chamber Music foreshadow those of Joyce's later work.]

The place of Chamber Music in the Joyce canon is at once first, last, and nowhere. Chronologically it is first. It is last for most critics. It is nowhere for most readers, who ignore it or read it too rapidly to gather what it can give. Joyce's own view, even at the moment when he had his worst doubts and almost withheld the volume from publication, was that the poems had "grace"; and perhaps he would also have called them "dainty," the word he uses in A Portrait of the Artist to describe the Elizabethan song...

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