Moir, David Macbeth
5 January 1798 – 6 July 1851
Moir was a Scottish physician, novelist, and poet – becoming both, formally, at the age of eighteen, when he earned his medical degree and published his first volume of poems. A prolific poet, Moir was closely allied with the Blackwood’s circle, publishing many of his works in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and doing editorial work for the publishing house; indeed, Moir even named two of his sons after William Blackwood and John Wilson.
Moir’s literary output covered a range of themes and topics, including a number of works readily locatable within the late Graveyard School tradition and others which extend Gothic tropes into the mid-Nineteenth Century in a way that seems redolent of Poe. Like most practitioners of late Graveyard verse, Moir rejects the troping of potent horrors in favor of a milder emotional tone; a softened melancholy evokes feelings that prepare the reader for a moral or philosophical observation without the hectoring, sermonizing energy often characteristic of earlier Graveyard School work.
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Etexts:
"David Macbeth Moir."