Monday the 12th
James Clarence Mangan Poems
"Dark Rosaleen," "Siberia," "Nameless One," "A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century," "The Funerals," "To the Ruins of Donegal Castle," "Pleasant Prospects for the Land-eaters," and "Woman of Three Cows."
James Clarence Mangan Links
James Clarence Mangan (b. May 1, 1803 - d. June 20, 1849)
Site http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/Poetry/Mangan.html
born in Dublin, the son of a poor grocer, his father having failed to retain a job in ‘eight successive establishments’; forced him to work as a clerk in the scrivening office of Thomas Kenrick (‘dull drudgery ... my heart felt as if it were gradually growing into the inanimate material I wrote on’). He started learning languages with the guidance of a Fr. Graham who taught him Latin, Spanish, French and German. He wrote ‘charades, enigmas & riddles’ for almanacs and directories under pseudonyms. He contributed to: The Dublin Penny Journal (as "Clarence"), The Satirist, Dublin University Magazine, Irish Monthly Magazine, and early editions of The Nation.
James Clarence Mangan (1803 – 1849)
Site http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2911
James Clarence Mangan (1803 – 1849) was a poet, translator and essayist who gave a voice to Irish nationalism before and during the Famine years. He was well connected with the Young Ireland movement. Mangan seems to have had little or no Irish himself, but he was provided with English translations to rework. He also translated poems from many cultures via German anthologies. His original poems are sometimes presented as translations, while his translations are sometimes so free that they become original works. He published mainly in journals; a two volume Anthologia Germanica (1845) was the sole book length publication in his lifetime.
Catholic Encyclopedia - James Clarence Mangan
Site http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09589a.htm
Irish poet, b. in Dublin, 1 May, 1803; d. there, 20 June, 1849. He was the son of James Mangan, a grocer, and of Catherine Smith. He attended a school in Saul's Court, but when still young he had to work for the support of his family. For seven years he was a scrivener's clerk and for three years earned meagre wages in an attorney's office. Mitchel accepts the story, related by Mangan himself, but which O'Donaghue is inclined to make light of, that he passed through an unhappy love affair, which infused the bitter and mocking note into his subsequent verses and even drove him to that intemperance which clouded the remainder of his days. In 1831, as a member of the Comet Club, he contributed verses to the club's journal, to which he sent his first German translations. His connection with "The Dublin University Magazine" was terminated because his habits rendered him incapable of regular application. When Charles Gavan Duffy inaugurated "The Nation", in 1842, Mangan was for a time paid a fixed salary, but, as on former occasions, these relations were broken off, though he continued to send verses to "The Nation" even after he had cast in his lot with Mitchel, who in 1848 began began to issue "The United Irishman". For these journals, as well as for "The Irish Tribune", "The Irishman", and "Duffy's Irish Catholic Magazine", Mangan wrote under various fantastic signatures.
James Clarence Mangan
Site http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000095736/
Irish poet, born in Dublin on the 1st of May 1803. His baptismal name was James, the Clarence being his own addition. His father, a grocer, who boasted of the terror with which he inspired his children, had ruined himself by imprudent speculation and extravagant hospitality. The burden of supporting the family fell on James, who entered a scrivener's office, at the age of fifteen, and drudged as a copying clerk for ten years. He was employed for some time in the library of Trinity College, and in 1833 he found a place in the Irish Ordnance Survey. He suffered a disappointment in love, and continued ill health drove him to the use of opium. He was habitually the victim of hallucinations which at times threatened his reason.
The James Clarence Mangan Collection
Site http://www.library.nd.edu/rarebooks/collections/rarebooks/mangan.shtml
James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849) is recognized today as a major Irish poet of the nineteenth century. Mangan worked for many years as a clerk and suffered from melancholy and alcoholism; he died of cholera in poverty and neglect. This collection, purchased from De Burca Rare Books in 1997, is composed of books by and about Mangan, many periodical issues in which his poetry appeared, his free translations of Irish, German, and other languages, and numerous other literary works and ephemera of the period. Ten books by Mangan are present in 42 variant issues, editions, or bindings, and 21 books are about him. The thousands of photocopies in the collection include all of Mangan's correspondence and the page-proofs of the seven-volume Mangan edition to be published by the Irish Academic Press. Periodicals in the collection include (among others):
James Clarence Mangan - Gallery Press
Site http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/JCmangan/jcmangan.html
His poetry draws on an extraordinary range of sources, including exotic languages and legends, and features also 'translations' for which there were no originals. It continues the lyric flights of Shelley and Byron and the gothic fancies of Coleridge and De Quincey. It anticipates the work of Poe (nearly his exact contemporary) and the more modern notion of the poète maudit, all the while foreshadowing the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine. Propelled frequently by his hypnotic rhythms, enlightened by verbal play and ingenuity, from couplets to long poems, he gives voice to the starkness of his own predicament, 'Old and hoary at thirty-nine', and, in a poem like 'Siberia', fuses a desolate interior with the great concern of Famine Ireland. His masterpieces, 'The Nameless One' and 'Twenty Golden Years Ago', are cornerstones of nineteenth-century poetry, while ardent period pieces, such as 'Dark Rosaleen', are anthems of a former age. In tune with the intense passions of his time, his work appeared in the first issue of The Nation (1842). By the time of his death -- of cholera -- in Dublin in 1849, his haunted brain had sung, in high-flown reverie, 'life's bitter cup and woe'.
James Clarence Mangan - Catholic Forums
Site http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/ncd05019.htm
Poet, born Dublin, Ireland, 1803; died there, 1849. After working for several years as a clerk in a scrivener's office, and for an attorney, he began in 1831 to write verses for the Journal of the Comet Club. He later contributed to the "Nation" inaugurated in 1842, to the "United Irishman," the "Irish Tribute," "The Irishman," and the "Dublin Irish Catholic Magazine," under fantastic signatures. The chief editions of his poems (O'Donoghue ascribes between 800 and 900 to him) are Louise Guiney's (1897) and the Centenary edition (Dublin and London, 1903).
"We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence."
W. B. Yeats, speech in the Irish Senate, June 11, 1925