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Yeats
wished to be 'counted one' with him. Joyce decreed he was 'the
most distinguished poet of the Celtic world and one of the most
inspired poets of any country ever to make use of the lyric form.'
His gravestone proclaims him to be 'Ireland's National Poet'.
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.
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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'.
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