Easts

Abstract

Abstract ‘Stick to the East;—the oracle [Madame de Staël] told me it was the only poetical policy. The North, South, and West, have all been exhausted . . . the public are orientalizing, and pave the path for you.’ Thus Lord Byron to the Irish poet Tom Moore in May 1813, a year after he had achieved fame with the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, based on his own Levantine Grand Tour of 1809–11. Byron’s remarks give us insight into the workshop of Romantic orientalism, spiriting us behind the splendid façade to the nitty-gritty of poetic production. His canny exhortation ‘stick to the East’ suggests both the importance of oriental settings and materials for Romantic poets, as well as the sheer popular demand which stimulated them. Byron was the most accomplished orientalist poet of his generation: by 1813 he had completed The Giaour, the first of a series of Turkish Tales (The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and The Siege of Corinth).