ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century, British and French poets wrote widely and often on oriental topics. Even William Wordsworth, who was never an enthusiastic orientalist, participated, sketching the Orient as a place of risk and fantasy,
Percy Bysshe Shelley saw instead a languid woman lying "in the paradise of Lebanon / Under a heaven of cedar boughs."2 Victor Hugo found a city of crescents, blue domes, and great harems in which sultanas danced on silk carpets to the sound of drums.3 Theophile Gautier observed Muslim pilgrims who counted amber rosaries and an Egyptian peasant woman who, in the guise of a sphinx, "propose[d] a riddle to desire."4 For Alfred Tennyson, on the other hand, the East was a "Land of bright eye and lofty brow! / Whose every gale is balmy breath / Of incense from some sunny flower."5
