ABSTRACT
The notion of the polar opposition of Yeats and Joyce is rooted in their very first meeting. Richard Ellmann elegantly captures the dynamics of their dissimilarity:
The defected protestant confronted the defected catholic, the landless landlord met the shiftless tenant. Yeats, fresh from London, made one in a cluster of writers whom Joyce would never know, while Joyce knew the limbs and bowels of a city of which Yeats knew well only the head. The world of the petty bourgeois, which is the world of Ulysses and the world in which Joyce grew up, was for Yeats something to be abjured. Joyce had the same contempt for the ignorant peasantry and the snobbish aristocracy that Yeats idealised. The two were divided by upbringing and predilection.1
