Lot 173: MOORE, THOMAS STURGE (1870-1944, poet, wood-engraver and art critic)

AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('Sturge Moore'), to [M.A. Bayfield], thanking Bayfield for his expressions of appreciation of his own poetry, explaining that his own interest in metric is practical and not theoretical, and discussing English prosody, 2 pages, quarto, The Shiffolds, Holmsbury St Mary, near Dorking, no date [but probably 1919]

TOGETHER WITH: a lithograph portrait of Sturge Moore by Charles Shannon (1863-1937), lithograph, three-quarter length, head in profile to the left, signed by Shannon on a tab (a characteristic practice of Shannon) and numbered R41 by him, from an edition of 30, Delaney 41, only state, size of image c. 10½ x 7½ inches, framed and glazed, mounted to view, overall size 17¼ x 13¾ inches, [1896]

ENTIRELY ABOUT ENGLISH PROSODY: '...my proposal...was to drop scansion altogether and merely number accents and syllables as the best description possible...This is what poets really do though most of them are occasionally governed by more or less contradictory scruples drawn from different systems of metric...If a group of creative poets were to drop every guide except taste, new rhythms might appear...I doubt the existence of what Bridges calls "pure stressed verse" or even of what you call "nonsyllabic verse"...The fact I wish to raise into prominence is that emotion as it achieves felicity tends to ennoble and enhance pronunciation accent address and all the characters of speech in the direction of a newly felt beauty or ideality which the language as spoken may never before have captured or have only captured in the luckiest passages of the poets...'

As the protégé of Ricketts and Shannon, Moore became a 'Valeist', renting rooms in their house (formerly owned and decorated by Whistler) and thereafter regularly published in their journal The Dial and later contributed to the productions of the Vale and Eragny Presses, including works of his own composition and editing. He was also afforded an entrée into the society of such as Beerbohm, Yeats, Conder, Lucien Pissarro and even Oscar Wilde. In short, they gave him one of the finest opportunities ever afforded any man of being educated and absorbed in the arts. He became their closest associate and later their faithful apologist, was a model in Shannon's pictures, and acted as a safety-valve between his aesthetic landlords, helping Shannon print his lithographs and playing table-tennis with him.

As a poet Sturge Moore was acclaimed by Yeats ('...one of the most exquisite poets writing in England...'); Masefield ('...a poet and artist of rare gifts, a critic of delicate discrimination, and an exquisite lyric poet...'); Pound ('...certainly one of the most sensitive poetic sensibilities of the period...'); Lascelles Abercrombie ('...in his best poems, the greatest English poet of his generation...' ); and Desmond MacCarthy ('...[a poet with] an energy of conception in his best poetry and flashes of an incalculable intuition...'). He was the brother of the philosopher G.E. Moore.

Rev. Matthew Bayfield (1852-1922), classical scholar, author on prosody, headmaster and spiritualist, is best-known for his commentaries on classical Greek texts as well as his writing on poetry, including The Measures of the Poets, 1919, and A Study of Shakespeare's Versification, 1920.