Considered by many critics as the major writer of the twentieth century, James Joyce is nonetheless a minor poet both in the quantity and quality of his verse. The second of the ten children of John and Mary Jane Murray Joyce, James Joyce was born in Dublin to a solidly middle-class family that made its perilous way down the economic ladder while he was an adolescent. He nonetheless had the advantages of what began as an excellent Jesuit education and spent his university days at University College, Dublin, founded by Cardinal John Henry Newman in 1853 as the Catholic University and graced by the presence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on its faculty. The major literary form for writers in Dublin at the time was certainly poetry, and the young Joyce initially viewed his talents as a writer of verse. Various influences were at work on his imagination, including the...