Nicholas Moore (England)
1918-1986
Born in Cambridge,
England on November 16, 1918, Nicholas Moore (who wrote also under the pen names,
Guy Kelly and Romeo Anschilo) was the child of philosopher G. E. Moore.
Nicholas was educated at Dragon School in
Oxford and, later, the Leighton Park School in Reading. He attended the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland and joined the student body of Trinity
College in Cambridge.
As an undergraduate, with John Goodland, Moore co-founded and edited the literary review, Seven from 1938-1940. The journal was later edited by Gordon Crukshank, Sydney D. Trmayne, Randall Swingler, and Philip O’Connor.
While at Cambridge, Moore involved himself
with the London literary scene, serving as the assistant for the famed Tamil
poet, Meary James Thurairajah Tambimutti, who edited Editions Poetry London and
the Lyrebird Press. Beginning in the early 1940s, the author begin to publish
collections of poetry, which linked him to the group described as The New Apocalyptics.
In 1944, Moore published a collection of
poems, The Glass Tower, with
illustrations by Lucian Freud. The following year, he edited The PL Book of Modern American Short Stories,
and won that year’s Contemporary Poetry’s Patron Prize (W. H. Auden serving as
judge) for a another poem, “Girl with a Wine Glass.” Moore’s 1947 work, “Girls and Birds,” won the Harriet Monroe
Memorial Prize.
But, although his poetry gained him a
reputation in the US, he began, in the late 1940s to find it difficult to get
published. Throughout the 1950s he worked as a horticulturist, writing The Tall Bearded Iris (1956). Sometime
later, he entered a competition in the Sunday
Times for a translation award, entering 31 separate translations of a
single Baudelaire poem, each featuring a different aspect of the original,
rhyme, genre, pattern, symbols, etc. This work was later published in 1973 as Spleen.
In 1990 Carcanet Press published in
collection, Longings of the Acrobats.
At the time of his death, he also left behind a series of “pomenvylopes,”
idiosyncratic documents containing poems typed onto envelopes and posted to
friends.
His Selected
Poems was published by Shoestring Press in 2014.
BOOKS OF POETRY
A Wish in Season (London: Fortune Press, 1941); The
Island and the Cattle: Poems (London: Fortune Press, 1941); A Book for Priscilla: Poems (Cambridge:
Epsilon Pamphlets, 1941); The Cabaret,
the Dancer, the Gentlemen: Poems (London: Fortune Press, 1942); The Glass Tower (London: P[oetry] L[ondon],
1944); Thiry-Five Anonymous Odes (no
publisher listed, 1944);[as Guy Kelly] The
War of the Little Jersey Cows (No publisher listed, 1945); New Poetry (London: Fortune Press,
1945); The Anonymous Elegies and Other
Poems (no publisher listed, 1945); Recollections
of the Gala: Selected Poems (1950); Lacrimae
rerum: Last Poems (Hebden Bridge, England: Open Township & Poetrical
Histories, 1988) Longings of the Acrobats:
Selected Poems (Manchester, England:
Carcanet, 1990); [as Romeo Anschilo] Anxious
to Please (Oasis Books, 1995); Selected
Poems (Brooklyn, New York: Shoestring Press, 2014)
For a small
selection of poems by Moore, go here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/nicholas-moore
To read Moore's Spleen, go here:
http://www.ubu.com/ubu/moore_spleen.html
To read Moore's Spleen, go here:
http://www.ubu.com/ubu/moore_spleen.html
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