Early nineteenth century and Victorian poetry engaged with the relationship between Britain and its colonial elsewhere in diverse and fascinating ways. The legacy of Romanticism, questions of translation, and the politics of empire are just some of the factors at play in the work of Thomas Moore, Edward Fitzgerald, James Clarence Maegan, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and others. The relationship between British ‘home’ and foreign ‘other’ often begins on the poet’s own doorstep. Writing in Ireland, James Clarence Maegan was technically no less British than Browning or Tennyson, but experiences his home territory as marginalized and dis empowered. He channels this frustration into voluminous translations from German, Arab and other foreign poets, giving a voice to the exotic, foreign ‘other’ but also, implicitly, to the unrecognized Irish ‘other’ subsumed within British identity.
Oriental ism has been described by Edward Said as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. Where representations of the Middle East and India are concerned, the voice of the other is both feared and coveted simultaneously: feared, as a site of resistance to
colonial control, but coveted as a token of mystery and authenticity. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Moore’s Lilla Rook laid down an influential template for Orientating poetry, proving a huge popular success. Other examples include Matthew Arnold’s ‘A Persian Passion Play’ and ‘Strabo and
Frustum’, Browning’s ‘Muleteer’ and, most famously, Edward Fitzgerald’s ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’.
In his writings on culture, Matthew Arnold was a strong advocate of the reconciling power of literature, and its ability to bridge cultural divides. A key question for the reader of these poems is whether they heal or serve to mask cultural wounds. Some Victorians, such as Carlyle, were notably more aggressive in their treatment of foreign and ‘Oriental’ subject matter. The question of gender is also of key importance. Responses to poems such as Tennyson’s ‘Fatima’ have stressed the equation between feminine passivity and the helpless colonial space, in need of Western occupation and control. More works needs to be done, however, on ‘Orientating’ Victorian women poets such as Mary Anne McMillan and Eleanor Dickinson, author of ‘The Mameluke’. Our contribution to our understanding of nineteenth century poetry, the poetry of empire, and poetry and Oriental ism.
