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The Music of the Sentimental Nationalist Heart: Thomas Moore and Seamus Heaney

For contemporary Irish poets, the figure of Thomas Moore bears a complicated legacy. The efforts of Yeats alone did much to establish a critical orthodoxy that emphatically banished Moore to the lower tiers of poetic achievement and branded him with the image of London drawing rooms. Though quick to approve of the rustic authenticity that he found in other ballad writers, Yeats accused Moore of sounding “artificial and mechanical.”1 Moreover, Yeats saw Moore in constrast to the “wonderful freshness” of the ballad writers, who never “wrote out of mere vanity or mere ambition, but ever from a full heart.”2 Moore was“merely an incarnate social ambition,”3 and never a “poet of the people.”4 Irish poets after Yeats have for the most part upheld this opinion. Patrick Kavanagh notes brutally in “A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue” that in his Dublin statue lies “the cowardice of Ireland.”5 Brendan Kennelly calls Moore “a poor pop-singer, a facile gaudy entertainer.”6 And the title of Tom Paulin’s 1984 essay on Moore, “A Professional Irishman,” says all it needs to say.7 Nevertheless, despite the adverse critical legacy of Moore’s work, Seamus Heaney has demonstrated an abiding interest in Moore that—while not fully restoring Moore’s poetic stature—has contributed significantly to a reappraisal of Moore’s role in Irish literary and cultural history. Most recently, Heaney has lent his support to efforts to commemorate the bicentenary of Moore’s