ABSTRACT
A re-reading of Anna Livia Plurabelle, with much more pleasure than at any previous reading, convinces me that in an article which you kindly published in the Criterion of September, 1928 [No. 178], I did not do complete justice to Mr. Joyce’s new prose, and with your permission I should like to add a further word to what I said in that essay. I do not think that there is anything in that essay which I do not still believe, but it did not go far enough in its appreciation of the merits that do lie in Mr. Joyce’s language. It becomes clear to me that a kind of distinction once properly made between prose and poetry is passing away…. This prose that conveys its ‘meaning’ vaguely and unprecisely, by its style rather than its words, has its delights, as music has its own particular delights proper to itself, and I have wished to say that for these half-conveyed, or not even half-conveyed suggestions of ‘meaning’ Mr. Joyce’s prose can be tantalizingly delightful, a prose written by a poet who missed the tide, and which can be entirely charming if approached as prose from which an explicit or intellectual communication was never intended. In my article and elsewhere, I suggested that such prose is, as it were, morally deficient-being almost wholly sensuous-but that question I do not wish to re-open here….
