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

In 1817, in his History of British India, James Mill wrote scathingly of the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata:

These fictions are not only more extravagant, less correspondent with the physical and moral laws of the universe,but are less ingenious, more monstrous,and have less of anything that can engage the affection, awaken sympathy, or excite admiration, reverence or terror, than the poems of any other, even the rudest people with whom our knowledge has brought us acquainted.¹

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.² 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?³ 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.⁴ This article considers how contemporary literary criticism, from the belles-lettrists of the mid eighteenth-centuryto 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 demand that the literary work engage sympathetically with the reader; a nostrumof Augustan, Romantic and even Utilitarian criticism alike.

The mechanics of imaginative sympathy in turn dictated that the contents of a poem must reflect known forms if the requisite 'interest' was to be awakened in the reader, a problem Southey acknowledged when he wrote dolefully to Walter Scott in 1810 that Kehama was 'too strange, too much beyond human sympathies'.⁵ By contrast, Byron and his friend Moore understood early on that Orientalist poetry must combine Eastern and Western elements if it was to be exotic without relinquishing the goodwill of critics and readers. In a typically self-reflexive stanza from Beppo: A Venetian Story (1818), Byron describes the ideal of poetry he would write, had he 'the art of easy writing': 'How quickly would I print (the world delighting) / A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale; / And sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, / Some samples of the finest Orientalism'.⁶ Unlike Southey, whose Kehama was an awkward hybrid product, Byron and Moore brought the composition of Orientalist poetry to a fine art, like alchemists conjuring poetic gold out of formerly inimical elements. This allowed them to avoid many of the pitfalls then associated with Oriental poetry proper, most conspicuous of which was the charge that Oriental poems were incapable of directing the passions towards edifying ends.

Eighteenth-century commentators tended to regard the East as a land of imagination, a view stemming from the widely-held...