Editing Thomas Moore (section)

=== Later criticism and reappraisal ===
The ''Melodies'' setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes has been seen as one of the chief cultural expressions of the linguistic transition in Ireland from [[Irish language|Gaelic]] to English.<ref name=":1">{{cite web |last1=M. Love |first1=Timothy |year=2017 |title=Gender and the Nationalistic Ballad: Thomas Davis, Thomas Moore, and Their Songs |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44807357 |publisher=University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies) |page=68-85 |journal=New Hibernia Review}}</ref> 

In the new lyrics, some critics detected a tone of national resignation and defeatism: a "whining lamentation over our eternal fall, and miserable appeals to our masters to regard us with pity". [[William Hazlitt]] observed that "if Moore's ''Irish Melodies'' with their drawing-room, lackadaisical, patriotism were really the melodies of the Irish nation, the Irish people deserve to be slaves forever".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Quinn |first=James |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Y260DQAAQBAJ&dq=The+Nation,+Young+Ireland,+robert+Emmet&pg=PT64 |title=Young Ireland and the Writing of Irish History |date=2015 |publisher=University College Dublin Press |isbn=978-1-910820-92-6 |language=en}}</ref> Moore, in Hazlitt's view had "convert[ed] the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff box".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Vail |first=Jeffery |date=4 July 2019 |title=Sources and Style in Moore's Irish Melodies / The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 |url=https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2019.1638099 |journal=European Romantic Review |volume=30 |issue=4 |pages=(465–469) 465 |doi=10.1080/10509585.2019.1638099 |s2cid=203049115 |issn=1050-9585}}</ref> It was a judgement later generations of Irish writers appeared to share.<ref name="Nolan 2009">{{Cite journal |last=Nolan |first=Emer |date=2009 |title='The Tommy Moore Touch': Ireland and Modernity in Joyce and Moore |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/467087 |journal=Dublin James Joyce Journal |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=64–77 |doi=10.1353/djj.2009.0002 |s2cid=194076424 |issn=2009-4507}}</ref>

In [[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|''A'' ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'']], as he passes "the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland" in [[College Street, Dublin|College Street]], [[James Joyce]]'s biographic protagonist, [[Stephen Dedalus]], remarks on the figure's "servile head".<ref name=":4">{{Cite book |last=Vaill |first=Jeffrey |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-irish-poets/34A91B2E1FDAAB4EF2CA583F8F8FE3EB |title=The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets |date=2017 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-108-42035-8 |editor-last=Dawe |editor-first=Gerald |series=Cambridge Companions to Literature |location=Cambridge |pages=61 |chapter=Thomas Moore |doi=10.1017/9781108333313}}</ref> Yet in his father's house, Dedalus is moved when he hears his younger brothers and sisters singing Moore's [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44782/oft-in-the-stilly-night-scotch-air "Oft in the Stilly Night".] Despite Joyce's occasional expressions of disdain for the bard, critic Emer Nolan suggests that the writer responded to the "element of utopian longing as well as the sentimental nostalgia" in Moore's music.  In ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'', Joyce has occasion to allude to virtually every one of the ''Melodies.<ref name="Nolan 2009" />''

While acknowledging that his own sense of an Irish past was "woven . . . out of Moore's ''Melodies",'' in a 1979 tribute to Moore, [[Seamus Heaney]] remarked that Ireland had rescinded Moore's title of national bard because his characteristic tone was '"too light, too conciliatory, too colonisé" for a nation "whose conscience was being forged by James Joyce, whose tragic disunity was being envisaged by [[W. B. Yeats|W.B. Yeats]] and whose literary tradition was being restored by the repossession of voices such as [[Aogán Ó Rathaille|Aodhagán O Rathaille]]'s or [[Brian Merriman]]'s".<ref>Heaney, Seamus (1979, "Introduction" in David Hammond (ed) ''A Centenary selection from Moore's Melodies,'' Dublin, G. Dalton, p. 9</ref><ref name="Nolan 2009" />

More recently, there has been a reappraisal sympathetic to Moore's "strategies of disguise, concealment and historical displacement so necessary for an Irish Catholic patriot who regularly sang songs to London glitterati about Irish suffering and English 'bigotry and misrule'".<ref name="Vail 2019">{{Cite journal |last=Vail |first=Jeffery |date=4 July 2019 |title=Sources and Style in Moore's Irish Melodies / The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 |url=https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2019.1638099 |journal=European Romantic Review |volume=30 |issue=4 |pages=465–469 |doi=10.1080/10509585.2019.1638099 |s2cid=203049115 |issn=1050-9585}}</ref> The political content of the ''Melodies'' and their connections to the United Irishmen and to the death of Emmet have been discussed in Ronan Kelly's biography of the poet, ''Bard of Erin'' (2008), by Mary Helen Thuente in ''The Harp Restrung: the United Irishmen and the Rise of Literary Nationalism'' (1994); and by Una Hunt in ''Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore'' (2001).<ref name="Vail 2019" />

Eóin MacWhite<ref>{{Cite journal |last=MacWhite |first=Eóin |date=1972 |title=Thomas Moore and Poland |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25506260 |journal=Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature |volume=72 |pages=49–62 |jstor=25506260 |issn=0035-8991}}</ref> and Kathleen O'Donnell<ref>{{Cite journal |last=O'Donnell |first=Kathleen Ann |date=30 December 2019 |title=Translations of Ossian, Thomas Moore and the Gothic by 19th Century European Radical Intellectuals: The Democratic Eastern Federation |url=https://journals.umcs.pl/lsmll/article/view/8916 |journal=Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature |volume=43 |issue=4 |pages=89 |doi=10.17951/lsmll.2019.43.4.89-104 |s2cid=214352160 |issn=2450-4580|doi-access=free }}</ref> have found that the political undertone of the ''Melodies'' and of other of Moore's works was readily appreciated by dissidents in the imperial realms of eastern Europe. [[Greeks in Romania|Greek-Rumanian]] conspirators against the [[Ottoman Sultanate|Sultan]], [[Decembrist revolt|Russian Decembrists]] and, above all, Polish intellectuals recognised in the Gothic elements of the ''Melodies'', ''[[Lalla Rookh]]'' (“a dramatization of Irish patriotism in an Eastern parable”)<ref>MacWhite (1971), p. 50.</ref> and ''Captain Rock'' (all of which found translators) "a cloak of culture and fraternity".<ref>O'Donnell (2019), p. 91.</ref>