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Rethinking Romantic poetry and history lyric seducer so trashily suspect that Coleridge refused to have a poem of his own included in a memorial volume for Robinson because the volume was also to include some of Moore’s poetry: “I have a wife, I have sons, I have an infant Daughter – what excuse could I offer to my own conscience if by suffering my name to be connected with those of Mr Lewis, or Mr Moore, I was the occasion of their reading the Monk, or the wanton poems of Thomas Little Esqre?”13 For Coleridge, Moore’s lyrics are all seduction, no imaginative or formal resistance This is at bottom Hazlitt’s assessment as well – except that for him, particularly in the earlier account given in the 1818 lecture “On the Living Poets,” Moore’s gift for poetic seduction demands its own recognition: “Mr Moore’s Muse is another Ariel, as light, as tricksy, as indefatigable, and as humane a spirit His fancy is for ever on the wing, flutters in the gale, glitters in the sun Every thing lives, moves, and sparkles in his poetry.” Moore’s most significant “fault,” consequently, is the corollary of this very energy – “an exuberance of involuntary power,” a “facility of production” that “lessens the effort of what he produces.”14 There is nothing in Moore’s lyrics that resists and, in resisting, would become capable of “grappling with the deep-rooted prejudices of the mind, its inveterate habits.” Hazlitt sees Moore as simultaneously “heedless, gay, and prodigal of his poetical wealth” and – far more successfully than Robinson – given to turning this very prodigality into profit: “Mr Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh, even for three thousand guineas.” “Even” is there in Hazlitt’s sentence to indicate that it is not the allure of making money out of the fad for Orientalism that is objectionable, but rather a form of poetic “execution” that “still turns to the effeminate and voluptuous side.” That Moore should be found seductive and “effeminate” is a point worth pondering, not least because the posture of seduction in the Thomas Little lyrics is sometimes resistant to any such characterization There is, for instance, “Did Not,” the poem with which W H Auden chose to open his selections from Moore in the 1966 anthology Nineteenth-Century British Minor Poets: ’Twas a new feeling – something more Than we had dared to own before, Which then we hid not; We saw it in each other’s eye, And wished, in every half-breathed sigh, To speak, but did not She felt my lips’ impassioned touch – ’Twas the first time I dared so much, And yet she chid not; 225 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
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