James Mangan (he adopted the ‘Clarence’ later) was born in Dublin in 1803. He worked as a scrivener and journalist, with stints in the Ordnance Survey Office and the library of Trinity College, Dublin. 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 hypnotic rhythms, enlightened by verbal play and ingenuity, from couplets to long poems, Mangan’s verse 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’.
Born in Dublin in 1970, David Wheatley now lectures at the University of Hull. The Gallery Press publishes his four collections, Thirst (1997), Misery Hill (2000) which contains 'Sonnets to James Clarence Mangan', Mocker (2006) and A Nest on the Waves (2010).
