Hours With Eminent Irishmen (McCarthy, 1886)

The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan (O’Donoghue, 1897).

Like a wail from the tomb … But of world-waking power.

Ireland’s Huguenots (Dublin Review of Books).The Boy From County Hell: – A Drink With Shane MacGowan by Victoria Mary Clarke.Late 1920s cards celebrating Irish place names.Mangan's verses have been compared (favourably and not) with those of Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Poe.Ī parrot's curt complaint ('Lamii's Apology For His Nonsense'), a philosophic 'Ottoman' discourse in the sand from Freiligrath's Wüstenpoesie ('My Themes'), and a pastoral idyll translating Rückert ('Nature More Than Science') : these are but a few works of the elusive Hibernian that are currently seen in this paper.

Yeats, James Joyce and Shane MacGowan (of Pogues fame). Clarence Mangan is otherwise quite neglected, even though he has deeply and directly inspired some rather famous writers who acknowledged their debt, among them W. This Victorian bard of Ireland is known in his native country for only a couple of poems, 'Dark Rosaleen', an allegorical Nationalist ballad, translated from the Gaelic, which is often assigned to schoolchildren for memorising, and 'A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century', an original poem in the bard-seer's mode of the aisling genre. To any reader who is receptive to it, much may be vouchsafed that is strangely rewarding, and oddly familiar for style, in the poems of James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849). There looms through these pages a worthy wraith named MANGAN (first syllable stressed, the 'g' hard and voiced, not as in standard 'sing', 'sang', 'sung'). The “Irish Poe” – a master of the humorous as well as the lugubrious and lyrical.The 'Writing Master' is another name for the bird called the Yellowhammer or Yellow Bunting, whose eggs have the natural appearance of being inkily stained and scribbled upon. To counter-nonsensical retorts : 'Because there is a b in both, and because there is an n in neither' (Aldous Huxley)Īnd the downright cryptic ignotum per ignotius : 'It can be found in a class with a Writing Master' (Fernando J. Solutions have ranged ~įrom the succinct : 'Because Poe wrote on both' (Sam Loyd)Īnd the anarchically symmetrical : 'Because one has flapping fits and the other has fitting flaps' (P. Once upon a tea-party, the Mad Hatter quizzed Alice with the notorious riddle, 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' Young Alice's host may never have been satisfied with an answer, but the blind alley of logic that Lewis Carroll created in Wonderland hasn't stopped the world from trying to solve it in the century and a half since then.

Alias joseph anton