ABSTRACT
The great period of India in English poetry naturally coincides with the revelations of Calcutta, or followed them soon after. The first British administrators had found out everything they could concerning the local civilizations, disentangling Indic thought from its Islamic overlay; Indic scholars who rose to answer their call were doubtless hoping for a real universality of culture. British historians have gone so far as to hold the movement of Rammohun Roy responsible for the Indian hostility to Hinduism which, between 1820 and 1830, had supposedly encouraged the young English administrators to imagine that they were dealing with 'a decayed society.' Raymond Schwab suggests that orientalism is intrinsic to Romanticism and the second section extracted. 'The Lake School and Politics', is concerned with the relations of literary men such as Macaulay with the British colony in India. Schwab traces Indian influences in the work of Southey and other Romantic poets, attaching special importance to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
