ABSTRACT
In 'Stephen Hero' James Joyce passed judgment on the romantic temper. Romanticism was closely associated with a kind of false and evasive idealism which is the ruin of man. Joyce's significant and demonstrable relation to the Romantic poets is centred on the lives and works of three English poets, Shelley, Byron and Blake, and an Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan, whose melancholy progress exhibited a natural history of Romanticism in an Irish environment. If Shelley played a part in forming Joyce's conceptions both of the poet and of the nature of artistic creation, Byron's example also exerted a considerable influence. In Joyce's fictional Dublin Byron seems to represent a popular version of what a poet should be. Of all Romantic poets it was Blake who was the most important for Joyce. Joyce acknowledged Blake as 'the most enlightened of Western poets' and praised him together with Dante as an example of how the poet transmutes the material of everyday life.
