‘Oriental’ and ‘Orientalist’ Poetry: The Debate in Literary Criticism in the Romantic Period

Abstract

Seven years earlier, Robert Southey used Vedic mythology as the basis for his own Oriental epic, The Curse of Kehama (1810). Critics dismissed the poem as absurd and it was widely remaindered. Yet in the same year that Mill made his notorious remarks, Thomas Moore published his bestselling Oriental poem, Lalla Rookh. Moore’s poem sold a staggering 22,500 copes over 15 editions between 1817 and 1829 alone, fully justifying the 2000 guineas his publisher Thomas Longman paid for it. Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’ series (1813–14) also sold widely and established the poet’s reputation as a literary lion. Evidently there was a right way and wrong way to write Orientalist verse. How then do we account for these apparently contradictory attitudes towards Eastern culture, given the well-documented vogue for Orientalism taking place in Britain during the Romantic period? Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ has long been seen as inadequate in accounting for the wide variety of ways in which European writers engaged with the East, not least because it reduces the complexity of literature to a set of colonial or commercial imperatives. This article considers how contemporary literary criticism, from the belles-lettrists of the mid eighteenth-century to the writings of Mill, Coleridge and Wordsworth, influenced the composition of British Orientalist poetry in the decades after 1800, the high point of Romantic Orientalism. It begins with a survey of opinions on Oriental literature generally, that is, the perceived qualities of imaginative writing produced in the East as opposed to Europe, or the temperate zone, and progresses to the critical reception of Southey’s Curse of Kehama and Moore’s Lalla Rookh, poems that were frequently taken as negative and positive exemplars of the Orientalist genre. I argue that, during the Romantic period, developments in literary criticism, and particularly those concerning imaginative sympathy, were responsible for driving Orientalist poetry into ever more westernised forms. Strict critical parameters governed what was and was not aesthetically acceptable in poetry, chief among which was the Andrew Rudd