Conclusion

Summary

Disorientation, v.

• 1. deviation from the eastward position.

• 2. The condition of having lost one's bearings; uncertainty as to direction.

Oxford English Dictionary

If orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions and of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear a common ground, where we can respond with joy to what goes astray.

Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

I began this book by proposing the poetics of orientation as a critical mode of reading Romantic poetry and the rise of Orientalism. A poetics of orientation traces the centrality of the poet, relational subjectivities, the dominance of the imagination, the lack of a coherent “Other,” dislocated setting and/or time period, and plurality amidst universalism. The Scottish writer Hugh Blair argues in his 1763 dissertation on Ossian, “What we have been accustomed to call the oriental vein of poetry, because some of the earlier poetical productions have come to us from the East, is probably no more oriental than occidental; it is characteristical of an age rather than a country …” (4). In truth, this book has shown that what was often called “oriental” during the Romantic era represented British writers’ attempts to write and envision themselves in a more global world. These writers represented cultural difference via the “Orient,” remaking their own forms and styles in the process. “Characteristical” of their own aesthetics, the styles, subjects, and settings of Orientalism are indissolubly linked to the consolidated white subjectivity of the Romantic poet and an overwhelming imagination delinked from the colonial and imperial reality of British sovereignty.

This book has deployed multiple orientations—cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial, and gendered— through which to situate Romantic poetics. In doing so, it has focused on the Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings commonly deemed “bad,” unimportant, or marginal to the development of Romantic poetry. No longer marginal, the rise of the “Oriental” subject is essential to understanding the rise of the post-Romantic lyric subject as we understand it today. Starting with William Jones's call to turn to the East for expressive art, this book has surveyed Percy Bysshe Shelley's idiom of shapes, Byron's cosmopolitan “East,” Felicia Hemans's affective poetics, William Blake's queer orientations, and detoured through the poetics of Wheatley, keeping open the possibility of changing directions.