"Planetary Music"

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.”