Madam, - It is uncanny how James Clarence Mangan keeps on being Ireland's most insistently forgotten poet.
I beg to differ with the recent claim Andrew Cusack (November 5th) that Mangan's 200th birthday has passed largely unnoticed. So also, I suspect, do all the people who contributed to the success of the Mangan celebrations on May 1st. It wasn't just an effete coterie who thronged to the Irish Writers Museum that morning to see Robert Nicholson's display of Mangan memorabilia, and to hear Mangan read and remembered by the likes of Seamus Heaney, Paula Meehan, Garret FitzGerald, Theo Dorgan and Des Geraghty. The event was open to the public, and attended by well over 200 people.
Nor were the popular afternoon festivities in Mangan's place of birth restricted to Irish writers such as Evelyn Conlon, Peter Costello, Mary O'Donnell, Anne Hartigan, John Wyse Jackson, and Paddy Finnegan: that genius loci is, after all, a pub (The Castle Inn).
Those ample Mangan celebrations organised by Claire Martin, Joe Woods and myself, organised received tremendous support from Dublin Tourism and from the media (including The Irish Times and RTÉ); they could not have gone by unnoticed. Mr Cusack may feel that our eight-volume edition of the Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, recently published by Irish Academic Press, is too scholarly to have broad appeal. That is precisely why IAP has brought out an accessible selected edition of the poetry, launched by Myles Dungan on May 1st, and why the selected prose will become available later this year.
A hundred years ago, at a time when Mangan was already championed by many writers, including W.B. Yeats (who called him "our one poet raised to the first rank by intensity"), the young James Joyce outrageously boasted of the discovery of Mangan. Joyce was a budding genius in need of a kindred precursor - hence his transformation of Mangan into "a stranger among the people he ennobled". Oliver Sheppard's bust of Mangan has been looking upon Stephen's Green for 94 years, but even now ambitious young littérateurs bemoan Mangan's under-representation.
I don't know why Mr Cusack wishes to relegate Mangan to obscurity; is Mangan destined to be an iconic national poète maudit? - Yours, etc.,
Dr PETER VAN DE KAMP, (Co-editor, Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, Mangan: The Selected Poetry and Mangan: The
Selected Prose), Ballyroe, Co Kerry.