I hate thee, Djaun Bool 
Denis Donoghue
- James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writings edited by Sean Ryder Buy this book
- The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1832-39 edited by Jacques Chuto, Peter Van der Kamp and Augustine Martin
- The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1840-82 edited by Jacques Chuto, Peter Van der Kamp and Augustine Martin
- James Clarence Mangan: Poems edited by David Wheatley Buy this book
- Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan edited by Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Holzapfel and Peter Van der Kamp
On 15 February 1902, James Joyce, aged 20, read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the Literary and Historical Society of what is now University College, Dublin. It was a brash performance. Joyce spoke as if he were introducing an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the facts that there were several collections of Mangan’s poems at large and that his life and work had been extensively written about. ‘Mangan has been a stranger in his country,’ Joyce claimed, ‘a rare and unsympathetic figure in the streets, where he is seen going forward alone like one who does penance for some ancient sin.’ Joyce was evidently more interested in Mangan’s temperament than in his poems and essays: Mangan’s ‘purely defensive reserve’, he said, ‘is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference’. Joyce recalled the passage, then already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his ‘imaginary portrait’ of Watteau: ‘He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.’ Swaying to Pater’s cadences, Joyce said of Mangan that he was
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Denis Donoghue teaches English, Irish and American literature at New York University. His recent books include Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (2000) and The American Classics (2005).
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