So Many Great Irish Writers Poem by Francis Duggan

No doubt Ireland's four Nobel Prize winners for literature were literary greats
Joyce, Beckett and Heaney and W B Yeats
Such beauty in their lifetimes in their words they did create
As World class writers with the best they does rate

But were they any greater than Oscar Wilde
The writer and wit that fame and fortune for awhile on smiled
Until his sexual preferences condemned him to fail
And he was sentenced to serve time in Reading's notorious jail

Sean O Casey, Oliver St John Gogarty and George Bernard Shaw of Pygmalion fame
Each in their own right a great literary name
And long before them the great Cork poet J J Callanan who from home died far away
His last remains in Portugal forever does lay

One who only did know oflife's tougher side
On his forty sixth year of life James Clarence Mangan died
Many claim him to be Ireland's greatest poet
And his name lives today as one of great literary note

It is said that the cream to the top always rise
Yet so many great Irish writers who never won a major literary prize
Far too many here for to mention by name
Though their literary outputs brought them enduring fame.