The aim of the present essay is to present these discrepancies in Thomas Moore’s life and their effect on his poetry, as well as Moore’s literary legacy in England and Ireland, his reception by contemporaries and later critics. After this, I analyse Moore’s Hungarian reception and the effect of his nationalist poetry on nineteenth-century Hungarian cultural nationalism and the three Romantic giants Vörösmarty, Petőfi and Arany. In the final chapter, I present the reasons for which Irish-Hungarian literary relations broke off in the second half of the nineteenth century for about four decades.