12/4/2023 0 Comments Clarence bad habits song![]() James Clarence Mangan was born at number 3 Fishamble Street, the ancient Virus Piscariorum of Dublin, on the first day of May, 1803. He had no public he was poor, infirm, homeless, loveless travel and adventure were cut off from him, and he had no minor risks to run the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams from a boy morbid fancies mastered him as the rider masters his horse the demons of opium and alcohol pulled him under, body and soul, despite a persistent and heart-breaking struggle, and he perished ignobly in his prime. One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals of English literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness and stagnant grief. It may be unjust to lend him the epitaph of defeat, for he never strove at all. Mangan’s is such a memory, captive and overborne. “ Delicate spirits, pushed away In the hot press of the noonday.” The more scrupulous contestants turn out to be The making of a name is too often like the making of a fortune. Apollo has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves : poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, whose thwarted growth and thinned voices " snatch a grace beyond the reach of art ” poets compounded of everything magical and fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of ecstasy and patience, and which wants in the end, even as common water would, the essence of immortality. Our time adjusts merit with supreme propriety in setting up Herrick in the market-place, and in still reserving Daniel for a domestic adoration. Some fame, and often the choicer and sweeter, is born, as by a paradox, to be a privacy. But, as Charles Lamb could not fail to perceive, it is not the greatest whom one cares most about. The great spirits, we know, carry applause by siege. All critics indulge in foolish cynicisms, one day or another, and cry out against a stupid world in behalf of the unrecognized. A large mass of his work, good, bad, and indifferent, hides in old newspaper files, and is likely there to remain and the only collection representing his genius, an edition eminently imperfect, bearing a New York imprint, and prefaced by John Mitchell’s beautiful memoir, has never been reissued elsewhere, nor bettered in any form. During his lifetime he published only a collection of translations, and by his own willful, exasperating hand his original numbers are tangled up almost inextricably with other translations. The search after him has always been difficult. Nor is Mangan’s absence altogether or even chiefly due to editorial shortcomings. Duyckinck, Dana, Palgrave, and the score of lesser books which are kind to forgotten or infrequent lyres know him not in Allibone’s Dictionary he has but hasty mention Ward’s English Poets has no inch of classic text to devote to him. ![]() ![]() Belonging to an age which is nothing if not specific and departmental, he has somehow escaped the classifiers his wings have never been run through with a pin and spread under glass in the museums. He is unknown outside his own non-academic fatherland, though he is a proverb and a fireside commonplace, much as the Polish poets are at home, within it. ON the principle that “it has become almost an honor not to be crowned,” the name of James Clarence Mangan may be announced at once, as very worthy, very distinguished.
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