Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
“I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
Summary
Chamber Music is nowadays mostly relegated to the margins of James Joyce's canon in a way not dissimilar to the early poetry of W. B. Yeats in Poems (1895) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899). One of the reasons, surely, is because both Yeats and Joyce partially disowned their early work. Yeats gutted his earliest volumes of poetry when he assembled Poems, stating that the ones he retained were the only verse from his youth he wished to preserve (Poems v). Joyce, when he was seeing Chamber Music through the press three or four years after the collection's inception, and after it had been turned down by at least three publishers, at once renounced and embraced the book. As he wrote to his brother Stanislaus in October 1906, he felt it was too much the work of his younger self:
The reason that I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent. I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it. […] I went through the entire book of verses mentally on receipt of Symons’ letter and they nearly all seemed to me poor and trivial: some phrases and lines pleased me and no more.
(Letters II 182)Somewhat later, in February 1907, he wrote again to Stanislaus: “I don't like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it. However, it is a young man's book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music” (Letters II 219). The renunciation seems extraordinary. By now he had got used to the idea of being a prose writer rather than a poet, but the desire to see his writing in print was greater than his aversion to the immature work. At the time, he was of course also enacting a repudiation of his own self in the creation of his mock-heroic double in Stephen Hero, the writing of which at this stage was more than half finished.
Yet a crucial difference in the reception of Yeats's and Joyce's early work is that Yeats's early poems have retained a popular readership.
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- Information
- Writing Modern Ireland , pp. 43 - 66Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015