Best friend to Lord Byron; famous throughout Europe and America as a poet, composer, singer, wit, and polemicist; Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was the embodiment of Romanticism. It is said he was often moved to tears by his own songs, and so were his audiences. Servants lined up behind closed doors to hear him; women swooned, wrote him notes in verse, and treasured locks of his hair. The first in a long line of Irish poet-performers who combined personal expression with a zeal for political and social reform, Moore formed a vital link between the old Gaelic bardic tradition -- nearly extinct in his day -- and the popular songs in English that fueled the flames of nationalism in early nineteenth century Ireland.Including Moore's lyrics to accompany the songs recorded here, James Flannery's book is part biography, part music history, and part history of a nation. It presents the story of Thomas Moore in the context of the Irish nationalist movement and explains the lasting influence the songs of Moore have had on the lives of countless millions of Irish emigrants, who found in them a symbolic link with their homeland.

Once regarded as Ireland’s national bard, Thomas Moore's lasting reputation rests on the ten immensely popular collections of drawing-room songs known as the Irish Melodies, published between 1808 and 1834. Moore drew on anthologies of ancient music, breathing new life into the airs and bringing them before a global audience for the very first time. Recognizing the unique beauty of the airs as well as their symbolic significance, these qualities were often interwoven into the verses providing potent political commentary along with a new cultural perspective. At home and abroad, Moore’s Melodies created a realm of influence that continued to define Irish culture for many decades to come. Notwithstanding the far-reaching appeal and success of the collections, Moore has only recently begun to receive serious attention from scholars. Una Hunt provides the first detailed study of Moore’s Irish Melodies from a combined musical and literary standpoint by drawing on a practical understanding and an unrivalled performance experience of the songs. The initial two chapters contextualize Moore and his songs through a detailed examination of their sources and style while the following chapters concentrate on the collaborative work provided by the composers Sir John Stevenson and Henry Rowley Bishop. Chapters 5 and 6 reappraise musical sources and Moore’s adaptation of these, supported and illustrated by the Table of Sources in the Appendix.

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Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore’s music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore’s importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing— as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.

Write My Name: Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore is the first monograph devoted to Moore’s poetry. The focus of the book is on Moore’s poetry and differing formulations of authorship therein. Its scope comprises poetic publications from Moore’s early career, from his Romantic Orientalist writings, and from selected musical works, and political and satirical verse. It shares the strong historicist awareness of much previous scholarship on Moore, but combines this with a range of new and interdisciplinary contexts that are of increasing interest to scholarship in the twenty-first century, and which are rarely adopted as frameworks for viewing Moore’s work: digital humanities, book history, legal history, and textual theory. Ultimately, the book argues for the value of attending to neglected aspects of Moore’s work through analysis of his shifting modes of authorship and their various motivations