Amongst Women: Thomas Moore and classical inspiration

This chapter situates Thomas Moore – and his early poetry – amongst women, addressing the ways in which the figuration of woman in his verse – principally as an object of erotic desire – informed his oeuvre, and examining his relationships with actual women, most notably with Sydney Owenson in her relatively neglected capacity as a poet much influenced by Moore's seductive early lyrics, in that critically forgotten moment before the first number of the Irish Melodies, Lalla Rookh, and the great satires such as The Fudge Family in Paris. Thomas Moore was a master of a 'fleshy' kind of Romanticism. Thomas Moore, in Lord Byron's account, wrote for women. Moore's verse had acquired him the reputation as something of a ladies' poet, making him in large demand in later years with editors of the gift books and poetical annuals of the 1820s.