Joyce, James - M. D. Z. (essay date 1930)

M. D. Z. (essay date 1930)

SOURCE: "The Lyrics of James Joyce," in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, July, 1930, pp. 206-13.

[In the following review, the critic offers a mixed assessment of poems comprising Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach.]

The interest aroused by the ever-expanding design of the Work in Progress [Finnegans Wake], as it appears in quarterly installments in transition, as well as by the inclusion of three segments of this prose epic among the poems which the Messrs. Ford and Aldington have gathered in their recent Imagist Anthology, 1930, is probably sufficient reason for recalling that among Joyce's achievements is a small group of lyrics which certain readers still claim as his most beautiful work. Throughout his career Joyce has been regarded in many quarters as fundamentally a poet. When Ulysses appeared in 1922, its first readers and critics, encountering...

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