James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849) was one of the most renowned Irish poets of his generation. Born into a middle-class Dublin family, he was a polyglot who could speak and freely translate works from German, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, French, Latin and Irish. He would contribute original verses and translations to The Nation, and particularly after the Famine, began to contribute more consciously nationalist poems, such as My Dark Rosaleen, a free interpretation of the Irish-language poem Róisín Dubh, and A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century. Friends with Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, he was politically a nationalist, and avowed his support for Mitchel’s physical force republicanism in a letter to Mitchel’s newspaper The United Irishman in 1848. Mangan, who lived a troubled life, struggling with poverty and alcoholism, died of cholera at the age of 46. His legacy as arguably the greatest Irish poet of his generation was affirmed by Mitchel, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, the latter writing: ‘To the soul of Clarence Mangan was tied the burning ribbon of Genius.”
Writings
My Dark Rosaleen (1846)