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

Abstract

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”:

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