Like many of the little magazines of the early twentieth century, Dana has been all but lost to memory, surviving largely in the occasional footnote which duly cites it as the journal in which one of James Joyce's earliest published poems appeared. This piece, here titled only Song, is an unremarkable verse describing a young girl who—though she may presage the famous ‘bird-girl’ who occasions Stephen Dedalus's epiphany in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—bears a more striking resemblance to similar figures in the work of Oliver Gogarty, AE, and other Dana poets. Though the poem is signed, Joyce's name does not appear in the table of contents on the journal's deep green cover—this despite the fact that alone among the contributors to the magazine he had been paid the considerable sum of one guinea for a mere twelve lines of verse. One of Dana's editors would later commission the essay “A Portrait of the Artist” and then refuse to publish it claiming that it was incomprehensible. Joyce, ever distrustful of editors and publishers, told his brother Stanislaus that the piece was simply too autobiographical for the magazine's tastes and “these gentlemen consider that he has no right yet to write about himself”
General Introduction to Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought
Sean Latham
The Modernist Journals Project
Brown/Tulsa
