From Let Erin Remember to The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls, the Irish romantic writer Thomas Moore pursued his great theme of memory across an astonishing body of work, gifting to posterity a resonant vocabulary of absence and loss.
The Last Rose of Summer, set to a traditional tune transcribed by Edward Bunting in 1792, makes for a haunting opening to Martin McDonagh’s 2017 movie, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Meanwhile, Moore’s Melodies sound right through American popular culture, from the “Believe me if all those endearing young charms” piano gag in countless Bugs Bunny cartoons in the mid- to late 20th century, to the continued performance of The Minstrel Boy at the funerals of American cops, firemen and soldiers, with Joe Strummer’s rendition used on the soundtrack of Black Hawk Down (2001).
And yet, in spite of Ronan Kelly’s fine 2009 biography and some excellent editorial work on Moore’s writings by Jane Moore, Emer Nolan, Seamus Deane and Jeffrey Vail, it can be difficult to grasp the scale of his literary success across a range of poems, satires, biographies and histories.
The son of a Dublin grocer, Moore grew up in a house known for company and music, before progressing to Trinity College Dublin where, though he did not join the United Irishmen himself, he became friends with Robert Emmet. His politics have long caused comment, with English romantic writer William Hazlitt famously remarking that he had turned “the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box”. Byron is supposed to have been nastier about his friend Moore, remarking that “TOMMY loves a Lord". But that last comment is just one of the stories that Julia Wright holds up for scrutiny in her ambitious new book.
READ MORE
Thomas Moore and the Transatlantic gives us a new account of Moore as a mobile, transatlantic writer, attuned to debates about gender, education, boxing, empire, enslavement and agricultural trade. Moore’s movements across bodies of water, countries and class systems began in the Dublin of his childhood and youth, in Samuel Whyte’s school on Grafton Street. There he acquired a fluent voice, an open mind and an aversion to fixed positions: “Transatlantic Tom” was on his way, across local and global circuits, and Wright wants us to remember where he came from.
Claire Connolly is the author of Irish Romanticism: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
