William Jones, "Eastern" Poetry, and the Problem of Imitation

The notion that the end of the eighteenth century witnessed a major reorganization in the terms of aesthetic value is a commonplace of English literary history. Codified in such mid-twentieth-century volumes as Walter Jackson Bate's From Classic to Romantic and M. H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp, the Romantic "break" has remained largely intact through the upheavals in critical practice prompted by deconstruction in the 1970s and '80s, and new historicism in the 1980s and '90s. At each of these moments, major critical studies define the distinctively Romantic in terms of its problematic relation to mimesis: for example, Abrams characterizes Romantic poetics by a rejection of imitation in favor of expression, Paul de Man by a confusion "between an expressive or constitutive and a mimetic or literal language" (de Man 7), Jerome McGann by a desire "to occlude and disguise [its] own involvement in a certain nexus of historical relations" (McGann 82). Sandwiched between the neoclassical eighteenth century and the realist nineteenth,¹ Romanticism has thus come to stand for a lapse or hiatus in the rule of mimesis; even as it coexists with other, gradualist narratives, this sense of Romanticism as a radical but temporary suspension of mimetic order continues to exert a determining influence on the way this literature is studied, taught, canonized, and marketed.

Whether viewed as a real divergence in literary practice or (as Robert Griffin argues in Wordsworth's Pope, for example) a merely rhetorical assertion of difference, the break with imitation—the refusal, on the one hand, to imitate the example set by eighteenth-century poets, and, on the other, to base its poetics on the "imitation" of nature—has come to constitute the category of the Romantic.² And in articulating their differences from what preceded them, the discourses that came to be labeled "Romantic" frequently, even insistently, invoked a more fundamental difference through the figure of the Orient.³ Although Abrams finds sources for Romanticism's "expressive" orientation in a number of eighteenth-century writers, he gives credit for the first explicit codification of an expressive theory of poetry to the orientalist William Jones's 1772 "Essay on the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative":

There we find a conjunction of all the tendencies we have been tracing: the ideas drawn from Longinus, the old doctrine of poetic inspiration, recent theories of the emotional and imaginative origin of poetry, and a major emphasis on the lyric form and on the supposedly primitive and spontaneous poetry of Oriental nations. It was Jones's distinction, I think, to be the first writer in England to weave these threads into an explicit and orderly reformulation of the nature and criteria of poetry and of the poetic genres.

(Abrams 87)

While not all literary historians of the late eighteenth century attribute the same importance to Jones, Abrams is not alone in seeing him as a representative and even pivotal figure.⁴ None of these accounts, however, pay much attention to the venue in which the essay first appeared: it was included as one of two essays (the other was "On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations") appended to the young Jones's first volume of poetry, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages. This article will argue that orientalism's implication in a seminal moment in the formulation of Romantic poetics is far from coincidental. Jones's odd and heterogeneous book is in fact an emblem of the mutually determining relationship between the discourses of Romanticism and orientalism. Through a close examination of the contents of Jones's Poems, their typographical and generic precedents, and the rhetoric through which Jones attempts to influence his volume's reception, I will show that the problematization of imitation that defined the Romantic break depends crucially on a geopolitical as well as an aesthetic logic.

I

Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages does not, in fact, consist chiefly of poems "translated," in the sense in which this word is now understood, from the languages of Asia. Poems contains "A Persian song of Hafiz," a very free translation of...