Томас Стёрдж Мур: Поэт, художник и драматург

British poet, author and artist

Thomas Sturge Moore (4 March 1870 – 18 July 1944) was a British poet, author and artist.

Sturge Moore was born at 3 Wellington Square, Hastings, East Sussex, on 4 March 1870 and educated at Dulwich College, the Croydon School of Art and Lambeth School of Art. In Lambeth he studied under the wood engraver Charles Roberts. He was a long term friend and correspondent of W. B. Yeats, who was to describe him as "one of the most exquisite poets writing in England". He was also a playwright, writing a Medea influenced by Yeats' drama and the Japanese Noh style. As a wood engraver and artist he designed the covers for poetry editions of Yeats and others, as well as illustrating books for the Vale Press of Charles Ricketts. He was a prolific poet and his subjects included morality, art and the spirit writing in a 'severely classical tone', according to poet/critic Yvor Winters. In 1913 Moore nominated Rabindranath Tagore the Indian poet for the Nobel Prize in literature. Moore received a civil list pension of £75 per annum in 1920 in recognition of his contribution to literature. In 1930 he was nominated as one of seven candidates for the position of Poet Laureate. He suffered from chronic ill health, suffering a series of heart attacks in 1942 and 1943, and died on 18 July 1944 at a convalescent home, St Andrews Cottage in Clewer, Windsor, Berkshire, from a kidney infection following a prostate operation. He was cremated at Woking.

Sturge Moore adopted the use of his middle name 'Sturge' (his mother's family name) as a way of avoiding confusion with the poet Thomas Moore. They had two children: Daniel Sturge Moore, journalist and broadcaster; and Henriette Sturge Moore, prominent theatre designer, teacher and interior decorator. Moore was the brother of the Bloomsbury philosopher George Edward Moore, one of the founders of the Analytic tradition in philosophy, and uncle of Nicholas Moore, New Apocalyptics poet of the 1940s, and of the composer Timothy Moore.