| Welcome to the JAMES STEPHENS page of BEYOND BEN BULBEN James Stephens was born in Dublin circa 1880. His father died when he was a child and he was sent to an orphanage on his mother's remarriage. Stephens died in 1950 and in his lifetime wrote novels, short stories and poetry. THE CROCK OF GOLD is one of his best known novels, published in 1912 and still widely read and discussed today. James Stephens was a solicitor's clerk in Dublin in 1916 when he wrote his eyewitness account of the events of that fateful week in Irish history when the Easter Rising occured. This was published under the title INSURRECTION IN DUBLIN . JAMES STEPHENS: Primary Sources Insurrections (1909) (His first volume of poetry) The Hill of Vision (1912) The Charwoman's Daughter (1912) The Crock of Gold (1912) Here are Ladies (1913) The Demi-Gods (1914) Songs from the Clay (1915) Rocky Road to Dublin (1915) Green Branches (1916) Reincarnations (1918) Irish Fairy Tales (1920) Deirdre (1923) The Land of Youth (1924) A Poetry Recital (1925) Collected Poems (1926) Etched in Moonlight (1928) Julia Elizabeth: A Comedy in One Act (1929) Theme and Variations (1930) Kings and the Moon (1938) Collected Poems, 2nd. ed. (1954) A James Stephens Reader, Lloyd Frankenburg, ed. (1962) James. Seamus and Jacques, Llloyd Frankenberg, ed. (1964) Letters of James Stephens, Richard J. Finneran, ed. (1974) In Richard Cave's notes to George Moore's Hail and Farewell on p. 748 he describes Stephens life: "James Stephens(c. 1889-1950), poet and novelist, was for many years a scrivener with a firm of solicitors in Dublin and later was Registrar and Accounting Officer at the National Gallery of Ireland. There is little of the traditional Celtic quality in Stephens' works; instead he achieves a subtle blending of the grotesque and the profound, the whimsical and the supernatural. . ." George Moore on pp. 580/1 gives this account: "You don't think that AE will ever discover any one in Sinn Fein comparable to Synge? Yeats threw up his hands. It would be better, he said, if all his little folk went back to their desks. . . . And every Thursday evening the columns of Sinn Fein were searched, and every lilt considered, and every accent noted; but the days and weeks went by without a new peep-o-peep, sweet, until the day that James Stephens began to thrill; and recognising at once a new songster, AE put on his hat and went away with his cage, discovering him in a lawyer's office. A great head and two soft brown eyes looked at him over a typewriter, and an alert and intelligent voice asked him whom he wanted to see. AE said that he was looking for James Stephens, a poet, and the typist answered: I am he. THE POLIGNAC PRIZE Mr. W. B. Yeats said: We have awarded to Mr. James Stephens the Polignac prize because of his book, 'The Crock of Gold'. The conditions of the bequest required that the prize should be awarded for some book published in the twelve months that closed with December of last year, and that we should take into consideration the promise of the writer - that is to say, that we should give it rather to a young writer than to an old one. I can only speak of the reasons that made me propose 'The Crock of Gold' and give that book my vote. It has given me more pleasure, I think, than it could give to another man, wise and beautiful though it is, because it is a proof that my native city has begun to live with a deeper life. Mr. James Stephens has passed all his life in Dublin. He has been educated by the literary discussions, by the books and critical standards he has met. No matter how much we seem to create ourselves in solitude, wren or eagle, we proclaim the twigs we have sprung from. I think if he had grown up in Dublin any time before these last twenty years he would have found it hard to escape from rhetoric and insincerity. I hope he will not be offended if I say that even his rich soul might not have saved him from being, like some writers of young Ireland, but a gallant journalist. During these last years, the Dublin that reads and talks has begun to interest itself in the ancient legends and in the living legends of Connaught and Munster, and here in this book it discovers them weighty with new morals, lofty and airy with philosophy. The town has begun to make, it seems also, in Mr.Stephens' mouth new legends, new beliefs, new folk-lore, and instead of the rhetoric, the hard-driven logic - natural wherever the interest was political - there is a beautiful, wise, wayward phantasy, which an Aran Islander or Blasket Islander would take pleasure in, though not wholly understanding its new meanings. A phantasy that plays with all things, that reverences everything and reverences nothing, an audacious laughter, a whimsical pity. That is the thing I have loved most in Ireland. 'Improvement makes straight roads,' wrote Blake, 'but the crooked roads are roads of genius,' and who would not love that crooked fancy? But until I read this book I had thought the country alone had it, that a townsman had nothing for my love. Mr.Stephens has made an extravagant language, an extravagant world which enables him to speak and to symbolize his emotions and hidden thoughts, almost as fully as if he were an Elizabethan dramatist with the mediaeval gag but just taken out of his mouth. We can say so little without an extravagant speech, a vast symbolism. We of the Academic Committee are much wiser than we seem. You will listen to us for an hour, and you will be surprised at how little we have said, and even if you do not admire our books very much you will go away wondering that we could have written them. That is because we (unlike the characters in Mr. Stephens' book, 'The Grey Woman of Dun Gartin' and 'The Thin Woman of Innis McGrath', and the two philosophers, and the God Pan and Aengus Oge) have but our common speech. Mr.Stephens has invented all that phantasmagoria of eloquent people who have infinite leisure for discussion that he may express the things which Mr. Benson and Mr. Newbolt and Mr. Gosse and Lord Haldane and the rest of us are longing to say but are compelled to keep hidden within us. He is able, having escaped from sobriety and moderation, to express everything a mischievious candour like that of a school-boy, humour like that of a cattle-drover, a passion for life like that of a girl of sixteen, and the phantasy of a lyric poet. Our prize is given for general promise and not merely for one book, and that, I think, justifies me in saying that Mr. Stephens had perhaps deserved our award for certain of his poems for passages in 'A Prelude and a Song' for instance, had his prose been lacking. When I first met with his name I was not interested: reviewers had quoted violent verses about God and the devil that seemed too easy in their defiance. Besides, I had noticed that when a man of middle life writes his first poem, he invariably writes it about God, for he thinks there is no other subject worthy to occupy the whole of his attention, but I had expected from youth a more original delight. Now I am ashamed that because of these quotations so little characteristic of his rich genius, permitted others of my country-men to be before me with praise. I have learned to repeat to myself again and again such lines as that where he describes the sea tramping with banners on the shore, or the little poem which is very simple and very gracious; and not less personal, not 'crooked' and whimsical because it has inherited a cadence from William Blake. A woman is a branchy tree And man a singing wind, And from her branches carelessly He takes what he can find Then man and wind go far away While winter comes with loneliness, With cold and rain and slow decay On woman and on tree till they Droop down unto the ground and be A withered woman, a withered tree; While wind and man woo undismayed Another tree, another maid. BEYOND BEN BULBEN express their sincere thanks to David Madden Professor of American and Irish Literature in California for this information on James Stephens. David is currently in the process of prepating a crit |
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