Nicholas Moore Biography

British poet, born in Cambridge, the son of the philosopher G. E. Moore; he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. As a leading contributor to the anthologies of the New Apocalypse, his reputation was considerable during the 1940s. A Wish in Season (1941), his first book of poetry, was followed by seven further early collections, the contents of which are represented by The Glass Tower: Poems, 1936–1943 (1944) and Recollections of the Gala: Selected Poems, 1943–1948 (1950). Moore published no further collections until Identity (1969), after which he produced several further volumes, including Spleen (1973), which contained thirty-one ingeniously different versions of Baudelaire's ‘Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux’. Longings of the Acrobats (edited by Peter Riley, 1988) is a selection from his work. His earlier poetry often suggests the examples of W. H. Auden's lighter verse and more sinister lyrics. American experimental poetry became a prevalent influence in his later verse, which has been admired by a younger generation of British poets seeking alternatives to the central English traditions.