Even now that hour may be standing by the door." In placing himself immodestly in the succession of Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann, the young Joyce still visualized himself as a potential playwright (and may well have dedicated an early play to his own soul—no published work of his was ever dedicated to anyone), but of the three plays he presumably wrote, he allowed only the later
Exiles (1918) to survive. During his youth he also persisted in composing lyric poetry— the basic literary medium of the age he lived in— and continued to write poems even after he settled into a career as a novelist. In
Ulysses (1922) the boastful young poet Stephen Dedalus is deflated by his companion Lynch, who asserts, "those leaves . . . will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father." To make good on the claim (also attributed to Stephen in
Ulysses) that he "is going to write something in ten years," Joyce turned to prose narrative, first in a series of short stories and a quasi-autobiographical novel. The publication of
Dubliners (1914) and
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) brought him to the attention of the literati, while the 1922 publication of
Ulysses brought him to the attention of the world.
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