Peter Costello
The image of the doomed poet that Mangan aspired to: “The Poor Poet” by Carl Spitzweg (1839) (whereabouts unknown) Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet Bridget Hourican Gill Books, €22.99 / £17.50 James Clarence Mangan was not always destined to be Ireland’s ‘national poet’. That place at that time in the 1830s had been long and largely filled by Thomas Moore. Today Moore has a large and challenging statue…
