Joyce’s classmates started the magazine St. Stephen’s during his senior year at University College, then part of the Royal University of Ireland. Though independently run, the publication was at the mercy of administrative oversight. Joyce’s submissions of poems, stories, and essays were rejected by the editors or censored by school authorities, with the exception of a piece on the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849). In the essay, Joyce writes, “The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life—the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is intense—the life of Blake or of Dante—taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.”

Joyce became interested in contemporary drama while at university. He praised naturalist plays for their acceptance of life “as we see it,” and people “as we meet them.” The Irish Literary Theatre, spearheaded by the writers W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, was by then exclusively devoted to Irish plays. Joyce’s essay “The Day of the Rabblement” disparaged the project for its lack of cosmopolitanism. One pronouncement points to his life’s trajectory: “A nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad.” When his school’s magazine refused to print the essay, Joyce and Francis Skeffington, whose submission had also been rejected, self-published this pamphlet.

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.

Joyce composed The Holy Office shortly before he left Dublin in fall 1904. Titled after the Catholic organization that ruled on matters of heresy, the poem attacks the Irish literati— including several writers who encouraged Joyce in his career, such as W. B. Yeats and George Moore. When nobody would print The Holy Office, Joyce self-published it as a broadside, but he could not afford to pick it up before leaving Ireland. The printers eventually destroyed the sheets. After settling in Trieste in 1905, Joyce printed one hundred copies at the city’s most famous stationer. He sent half the edition to his brother Stanislaus in Dublin, instructing him to distribute the broadside to specific friends and writers, some of whom Joyce targeted in the poem.

There is a young boy named Joyce, who may do something.
He is proud as Lucifer and writes verses perfect in their technique.
—George Russell

The influential critic and poet Arthur Symons met Joyce in 1902. Like other well-known writers, such as W. B. Yeats and George Russell, Symons praised Joyce’s poetry for its beauty and audacity. Eager to assist, Symons sent Joyce’s Chamber Music manuscript to many publishers, though all of them turned it down. By the time Elkin Mathews agreed to print the book, Joyce was more invested in writing fiction. His brother Stanislaus sequenced the poems, though Joyce later claimed he had devised the order himself as a carefully constructed piece of music.

This letter to Adolph Mann (1874–1941)—one of many composers to set Joyce’s poems to music—dates from 1910. Joyce’s musicality (he had pondered a career as a singer) is reflected in his brief, though nuanced, evaluation of Mann’s composition. As the letter indicates, Joyce is much more interested in the proofs he is revising for the imminent publication of Dubliners, a book of short stories. His optimism about Dubliners would soon vanish. The process of publishing it would be drawn out for four more years, primarily because Joyce would not consent to editors’ and printers’ demands for changes.

Joyce was visiting Ireland when a second publisher reneged on their agreement to bring out Dubliners. The printer pulped the book, anticipating charges of libel and obscenity. Joyce responded with this satiric poem, which he later self-published as a broadside. The narrator, a printer-publisher, traces his shifting reactions to Joyce’s short stories: from initial neutrality to recoil upon seeing the work typeset, followed by patriotic self-righteousness and fear for his soul if he were to print actual placenames in Dublin. The narrator decides to burn the edition and, as a penance, to have his buttocks anointed with Dubliners’ ashes.

After the book’s destruction, a distraught Joyce had visited his father, whose advice was to “buck up, take back the [manuscript] and find another publisher.” Joyce left Ireland that night and never saw his father or homeland again.