In giving fictive flesh to his school days, Joyce presented a Stephen Dedalus in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) staunchly defending Byron against the vulgar onslaughts of the champions of Tennyson in Victorian Dublin, but the only example of his own poetry in the novel (apparently a youthful creation) is "The Villanelle of the Temptress," an exercise in fixed verse strongly redolent of Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Joyce, having left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, the woman who would remain his wife throughout his lifetime, settled in Trieste, where their son, Giorgio, and daughter, Lucia, were born and where he completed Dubliners (1914), wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Exiles (1918), and began Ulysses (1922). In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus is again seen duplicating the young Joyce's exercises as a practicing poet. In this instance, however, the quatrain that he records is imitative, to the point of unconscious plagiarism, of a Douglas Hyde translation from the Irish. Joyce himself had strenuously resisted the lure of the Gaelic revival, considering the reverence for the Irish past a retrogressive movement for a nation that he dubbed "a backwash," "an afterthought of Europe," and opted instead for the influence of the European mainstream.
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