The influence of the Orient on English poets of the Romantic
Revival, though perhaps not so deep and important, as on their
German and French contemporaries, has been found significant enough
to merit a study. Miss M.P. Conant of Columbia University, in her
book The Oriental Tale in En 'land in the 18th Century, (1908) . catalogued
a vast number of Oriental and pseudo-Oriental tales, inspired mostly by the introduction from France of the Arabian Nights &
Oriental tales. But her book treats only the eighteenth century
writers of prose tales - the only verse -tale of consequence. coning
under her survey being Landor's Gebir. The discovery of the
treasures of Oriental literature by Sir William Jones and other
Oriental scholars in the latter part of the 18th century and the
enthusiasm with which Oriental literature began to be studied both
in England and on the continent, were, however, matters of greater
and more far-reaching importance than the introduction of the
,Arabian rights. Books of travel, history and scholarship about
the Orient rapidly multiplied, from which the latter writers like
Coleridge, Southey, Moore, Shelley, and others, extracted material
for poetry. In our first chapter we have given a short sketch of
Oriental scholarship.and travel, enumerating some of the more important
books that supplied these poets with their bookish notions
of the Orient, and in the subsequent chapters, we have treated one
by one all those poets who wrote on Oriental themes; FitzGerald's
Rubaiyát being the culmination and the finest product of that Orientalism,
whose inaugurators were the late eighteenth century Oriental scholars, and some of the poets of the Romantic Revival.The concluding chapter contains some general remarks on the
tendencies and results of the period
