Irish Melodies of Anacreontic Balladry

This essay complements media theory’s historical interest in the ballad using a lesser-known tradition of song on the page, the Anacreontic ode. The parallels between these traditions, and their generic hybridizations I trace here, expand the terms of scholarly debate that have emerged in recent decades over the “scandals of the ballad.”² Theoretical problems around balladry—including the blurred distinction among “collection, editing, improvement, imitation … [and] forgery”—apply as well to Anacreontics.³ But the Anacreontic tradition’s quite distinct political register enabled a new kind of ballad rhetoric in the nineteenth century, especially at the imperial margins.

Anacreontics celebrating the pleasures of wine and love became a major Renaissance genre when a sheaf of supposedly archaic odes by the Greek singer Anacreon was discovered and published under mysterious circumstances in the 1550s (more on this below). This discovery echoes—or rather, anticipates—ballad history’s momentous rescues and remediations, most famously Thomas Percy’s discovery in the 1750s of a century-old manuscript containing ballads “from ages prior to Chaucer, to the conclusion of the reign of Charles I.”⁴ These ballads, which Percy said maids were using for kindling, formed the basis of the eighteenth century’s most influential ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). Along with formal similarities and the common understanding of both ballads and Anacreontics as types of song for social performance, such origin stories contributed, by the turn of the nineteenth century, to the emergence of a hybrid genre, the Anacreontic ballad.

My primary focus is on the Anacreontic ballads in Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, which Maurice Disher calls the “definite origin of Victorian song.” Published in ten series between 1808 and 1834, the Melodies achieved a “success so vast it has always been taken for granted,” setting “a new fashion for what should be sung not only in the home but in the opera house.”⁵ William Holman Hunt’s iconic 1854 painting, The Awakening Conscience, attests to Moore’s place in the Victorian domestic (in this case, illicit domestic) setting: behind the lovers, the melody “Oft in the Stilly Night” lies open on the piano.⁶ As Moore’s songs moved “from the drawing-room to the broadside and the theatre,” J. S. Bratton writes in The Victorian Popular Ballad, the best known among them entered the “repertoire of all sentimental singers.”⁷ With Burns, Moore “pointed the way ahead to the Scottish and Irish ballads of the Victorian period, and to a refined pseudo-folksong.”⁸

As the best-known and most prolific Irish balladeer in a period when, as Katie Trumpener argues, English writers were appropriating and politically neutralizing the figure of the bard from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, Moore occupied a strange position.⁹ Barely three years after his near expulsion from Trinity for associating with nationalist radicals, Moore moved from Dublin to London and dedicated his first literary publication, a translation of Anacreon’s odes, to the Prince of Wales.¹⁰ This translation made him famous overnight, and he was soon mixing with London’s elite. With the two original volumes that followed, the pseudonymous Poems of Thomas Little (1801) and Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), Moore became one of the most widely read poets writing in English.¹¹ In 1806, urged by the Dublin publishers James and William Power, who recognized commercial promise in a collection of Irish national music, Moore began writing ballads set to Irish folksongs. In writing these ballads, Moore was in fact resuming a practice he had started years earlier with friends at Trinity, among them Robert Emmet, who was executed in 1803 for leading a rebellion against British rule (Kelly, pp. 50–52). The earliest Irish Melodies included a coded memorialization of Emmet alongside memorializations of Irish war dead over centuries of Anglo-Saxon aggression. Yet the volume also included run-of-the-mill love and drinking songs in Moore’s Anacreontic key, and the melodies were at least initially intended for the leisure-hour consumption of the same (mostly English) bourgeoisie that celebrated his earlier work.¹²

The contradictions apparent on the surface...