Joyce, James - James R. Baker (essay date 1959)
James R. Baker (essay date 1959)
SOURCE: "Joyce's Chamber Music: The Exile of the Heart," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter, 1959, pp. 349-56.
[In the following essay, Baker considers love as the unifying theme in Chamber Music]
A common practice in much Joyce criticism is to dismiss Chamber Music as youthful trivia. Such an estimate is tempting because the thinness of the poems is indeed blatant when they are compared even with the fiction not far removed in conception, Dubliners and Stephen Hero. Confirmation of this now traditional disparagement is found in Joyce's own flippant rejection of the poems as "a capfull of light odes." While his critics are hardly to be blamed for neglect of obviously slight verse, the result has been a blind spot in our understanding of Joyce the man and his total accomplishment: if we ignore Chamber Music we lose additional evidence of the amazing unity of his...
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