James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin on May 1st, 1803. He was the son of a former hedge-school teacher who later became a grocer. Mangan was educated at a Jesuit school where he learned the rudiments of Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian, but when his father became bankrupt he was obliged to leave school at fifteen and became a lawyer’s clerk. He later worked for the Ordnance Survey and an assistant in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. He published his first verse in 1818.
Publications by and about Mangan include James Clarence Mangan, His Selected Poems with a Study by the Editor Louise Imgogen Guiney (Boston, Lamson, Wolffe & Co., 1897); James Clarence Mangan, by John Desmond Sheridan (Dublin/London,The Talbot Press/G. Duckworth & Co, 1937); Selected poems of James Clarence Mangan, edited by Jacque Chuto, with a foreword by Terence Brown (Dublin/Portland, OR., Irish Academic Press, 2003); The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, Poems: 1845-1847, edited by Jacques Chuto (Blackrock, Co Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1997); Selected prose of James Clarence Mangan:bicentenary edition, editors Jacques Chuto, Peter Van De Kamp, and Ellen Shannon-Mangan, with a foreword by A. Norman Jeffares (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2004); and James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writing, edited with an introduction by Sean Ryder University College Press, 2004).
Both W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, who wrote an essay on Mangan, were admirers.
After the Great Famine he became strongly nationalist, and wrote poems on national themes which are still well-known today, including My Dark Rosaleen and A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century.
Weakened by extreme poverty, alcoholism and malnutrition, he died of Cholera in 1849, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
James Clarence Mangan at Wikipedia
At Archive.org: James Clarence Mangan, His Selected Poems with a Study by the Editor Louise Imgogen Guiney, 1897
Poems by Mangan at Poem Hunter
James Clarence Mangan at The National Library of Ireland