Gabriel Fauré’s long career as a song composer, which stretched from 1861 to 1921, divides conveniently in half. Until 1890, he wrote individual mélodies; thereafter, he composed all but a handful within six carefully integrated cycles. (The lone outlier is Poème d’un jour, a short cycle composed in 1878.) Fauré’s turn to cyclic composition comes as little surprise as he had always tended to concentrate on individual poets. He confined himself to Victor Hugo in his early years, and then moved systematically through Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier before immersing himself in the poets of the Parnassian school. With singleminded focus, he would set ten poems by Armand Silvestre (1878–84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887–94), and eighteen by Charles van Lerberghe (1906–14).

Over the past two decades, Moore’s reputation as a producer and performer of Irish lyric has been at the centre of sharp-edged postcolonial critique condemning his exchange of the ‘wild harp’ of Erin for the ‘civil pianoforte’ of the English drawing room and fashionable society. This chapter reappraises Moore’s achievement as a poet with an attention to the interplay between lyric and song in their informing social and political contexts. It establishes the importance of Moore to British and Irish romanticism as a poet of sociability (in contrast to the idea of the solitary poet figured by the romantic ideology) positioned at the cross-roads of high and low art with an appeal across barriers of gender and social class. My title-phrase, ‘the social life of forms’, refers to the social contexts, the singing clubs and drawing rooms, in which Moore’s songs were performed, and gestures towards the sociality of song as a participatory medium. More than this, it identifies the surface, and, famously, in the judgement of William Hazlitt, the superficial quality of Moore’s poetry. That perceived superficiality is the quarry of this analysis, which argues for the significance of Moore’s surface technique.