Unauthorized Mangan

The only collection of poems that James Clarence Mangan ever saw through the press was a two-volume Anthologia Germanica that appeared in June 1845. The volume reprinted, with some revisions, 130 German translations that he had previously published in the Dublin University Magazine. At the time of his death four years later, the rest of Mangan’s vast output of close to 1,000 poems remained scattered in periodicals or in anthologies edited by others. Unlike the two major Irish poets that book-end the nineteenth century - Thomas Moore and W. B. Yeats - it seems that Mangan had neither the will nor the opportunity to ‘collect’ himself, to present an authorial identity that would be orderly, unified, permanent.²