A Young Poet

In the years immediately following Joyce’s graduation, his poems began to appear in English and Irish publications, such as the Venture and Dana. Joyce had hoped that Dana would instead accept a piece of prose titled “A Portrait of the Artist.” He reportedly cornered the magazine’s coeditor John Eglinton at his day job at the National Library and stood by while Eglinton read the piece. Eglinton recollected that he passed it back to Joyce, saying it was “incomprehensible.” According to Joyce, the Dana editors had admired the style but could not abide the references to sex. Both Dana and a supercilious librarian named John Eglinton appear in Ulysses.

James Joyce (1882–1941)
“Song”
In Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought 1, no. 4 (August 1904)
The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Sean and Mary Kelly, 2018; PML 197772

The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature
Cover illustration by Walter Bayes (1869–1956)
London: John Baillie, 1905 [i.e., 1904]
The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Sean and Mary Kelly, 2018; PML 197773
© The Estate of James Joyce.