‘Transatlantic Tom’: Thomas Moore in North America

Abstract

From his first published verse, which appeared in Dublin’s Sentimental and Masonic Magazine in 1795, Thomas Moore wrote lyric poetry for over 50 years. For nearly as long Moore also wrote satire: in Bermuda, England, France, Ireland and the US, in Juvenalian, Horatian and Menippean modes, in book-length satire and newspaper squib, and in novel, poem and burletta. This chapter focuses on a relatively unfamiliar aspect of the early part of Moore’s long career, the satires and lyrics written during the poet’s visit to North America of 1803–4, a body of work that has something remarkable about it, given that it is strikingly different from much of Moore’s mature verse. His satires on America have little in common with the brilliant Regency anapaests that made his satirical name and began with his succès de scandale, ‘Parody of a Celebrated Letter’ (1812), the work that established Moore’s reputation as the bête noir of the Tory government and Prince George. Similarly, his Canadian lyric poetry has more of the sublime about it than much of that which came before it — the twin books of amatory verse, the Odes of Anacreon (1800) and The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (1801) — and that which followed — the first instalment of the Irish Melodies (1808). The dual, and almost contradictory, aspects of Moore’s work, as brilliant satirist and Romantic nationalist, can be seen in embryo in his American poetry, and this early work is vital to understanding the transatlantic dimension of British and European Romanticism in the early nineteenth century.