Borrowed Imagination
Borrowed Imagination
Borrowed Imagination
The British Romantic Poets and Their
Arabic–Islamic Sources
Samar Attar
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by Lexington Books
A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Attar, Samar.
Borrowed Imagination : the British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources / Samar Attar.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-8761-6 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8762-3 (electronic)
1. English poetry--19th century--History and criticism. 2. English poetry--Arab influences. 3. English poetry--Islamic influences. 4. Romanticism--Great Britain. I. Title.
PR590.A88 2014
821'.709--dc23
2013046484
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Dalhousie University English and Gothic Literature Professor D. P.
Varma (d. 1994), and for Harvard University Arabic Literature Professor
Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007), in memoriam.
Wer sich selbst und andere kennt,
wird auch hier erkennen:
Orient und Okzident
Sind nicht mehr zu trennen.
(He who knows himself and others
will also recognize here that
Orient and Occident
are no longer separable).
—Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-ostlicher Diwan, 1819.
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Preface
xi
Introduction: The English Romantic Poets: Their Background,
Their Country’s History, and the Sources That Influenced
Their Literary Output
1
1
Borrowed Imagination in the Wake of Terror: Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and the Arabian Nights
25
2
The Riots of Colors, Sights, and Sounds: John Keats’s
Melancholic Lover and the East
65
3
The Natural Goodness of Man: William Wordsworth’s
Journey from the Sensuous to the Sublime
83
4
Poetic Intuition and Mystic Vision: William Blake’s Quest
for Equality and Freedom
99
5
The Interrogation of Political and Social Systems: Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s Call for Drastic Societal Change
119
6
The Infatuation with Personal, Political, and Poetic
Freedom: George Gordon Byron and His Byronic Hero
149
Conclusion: How Valid Is Kipling’s Phrase That East and West
Can Never Meet?
167
Selected Bibliography
181
Appendix A
197
Appendix B
211
Index
217
About the Author
227
vii
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of my manuscript for his/her
assistance and generosity. I do appreciate the time and care he/she took
in providing a thoughtful review.
ix
Preface
In April 22-23, 2005, Professor Wolfhart P. Heinrichs of the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University orga-
nized a conference on One Thousand and One Nights in honor of Muhsin
Mahdi, James Richard Jewett Emeritus Professor of Arabic at Harvard,
celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Mahdi’s Arabic edition of the
Nights, which was published in 1984 and the 300-year history of the book
in Europe. At the time I was a Research Fellow at the Center For Middle
Eastern Studies at Harvard. Heinrichs invited me to give a paper, and I
accepted his invitation although I was very busy working on a different
project.
My paper was entitled “Borrowed Imagination: Coleridge’s ‘Ancient
Mariner’ and the Arabian Nights.” Students from the English Department
came to listen to me at the time. The topic fascinated them. They asked
me many questions and assumed that I would be producing an article, or
a book of some sort on the debt of Coleridge, or other Romantic poets to
the Nights in the near future. Professor James Engell, the chair of the
department, read my paper, and encouraged me to publish it. He found it
“intriguing and informative.” But I was busy with two other projects. At
the end of June 2006 I had to leave Harvard and the United States, and
that meant I would not have enough sources to work with for a big
Romantic project. Widener and Houghton libraries would be out of reach
for me!
When I was growing up in Damascus, Syria, I have never seen, or read
the complete volumes of the Arabian Nights. Of course, as a child I was
familiar with tales, such as Sinbad the Sailor, or Aladdin. But neither my
family, nor my school had ever introduced me to such a book. The Nights
was not part of the canon of Arabic literature. Only in 1966 when Dalhou-
sie University in Canada sent me to Harvard to work on my MA thesis on
“The Influence of T. S. Eliot upon Salah 'Abd al-Sabur” that I discovered
the Arabian Nights. The Egyptian poet ‘Abd al-Sabur was attending an
international poetry conference at Harvard at the time. I interviewed him
and discussed his poetry with him during that summer. He referred to
the Nights several times and mentioned specific tales that influenced him
a great deal. When I went to read these tales in the dark stacks of the
library I was terribly shocked. Only then I realized why the Nights were
never part of my education. My family in Damascus owned a huge li-
brary. But the Nights were not there to be seen. I must confess I was not
xi
xii
Preface
happy to read the tale of “The Three Ladies from Baghdad” as suggested
by the Egyptian poet. For me it was sheer pornography. But I had to read
his sources in order to understand his poetry.
This was my first encounter with The Nights in both Arabic and the
various translations in European languages. And because it was not a
pleasant encounter, I revolted agains
t my mentor Professor D. P. Varma
who suggested to me in 1967 that I work on the influence of the Nights on
the English Romantic poets for my PhD dissertation. I did not wish to
touch that book again although I did not mind some of its tales, such as
“Sinbad the Sailor.”
In 1968 I moved to the United States to work on my doctorate in
English and Comparative Literature, and chose a topic on “The Intruder
in Modern Drama” in which I could utilize my knowledge of English,
French, and German and choose a sociopolitical approach to the study of
modern theater. But as a teaching assistant in the English Department I
always introduced my students to the Arabic sources of Dante, or the
European Romantics among others. One British professor in particular
was very unhappy about me stressing the influence of Sinbad the Sailor
on Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.” He was very Eurocentric and could
not possibly believe that non-European sources had ever influenced Eng-
lish literature. But my students, most of them were New Yorkers, did
enjoy comparing and contrasting old Arabic sources with relatively mod-
ern English and European literary texts.
Since the late 1960s I taught in different countries and continents, but
never managed to work on the British Romantics and their debt to the
Arabian Nights, or other Arabic sources. I was publishing books in differ-
ent areas. In 1987 my interest in the Nights was suddenly rekindled. I was
invited to Cairo by the feminist Dr. Nawal Sa' dawi to an international
conference. My paper: “The Journey from Barbarism to Civilization and
the Necessity of Restraining Female Sexuality: The Examples of Shahra-
zad and the Box Woman in One Thousand and One Nights” stirred a storm
in the city. The leading journals and newspapers commented on my
paper and attacked me for at least two months. Sa'dawi published my
Arabic paper in Cairo in 1988 and in English in 1990. An English version,
in collaboration with Gerhard Fischer, appeared in the summer/fall issue
of Arab Studies Quarterly in 1991, under the title “Promiscuity, Emancipa-
tion, Submission: The Civilizing Process and the Establishment of a Fe-
male Role Model in the Frame-Story of One Thousand and One Nights.”
Soon, an Arabic translation followed and appeared in the Egyptian jour-
nal Fusul in the winter of 1994. The Spanish scholar Pedro Monferrer Sala
translated the article into Spanish and published it in Anaquel de Estudios
Arabes at Madrid University in 1999. Since the late 1980s, many journals
and newspapers in the Middle East have mentioned my Arabic article in
their reports. Even the Palestinian-Israeli writer Emile Habibi used my
Preface
xiii
findings in a talk he gave in Berlin in 1988 without ever acknowledging
me. I happened to be among the audience that evening!
At that time I did not think much of Shahrazad, or the Box Woman as
role models for eighteenth-century British women, such as Mary Woll-
stonecraft, or her daughter Mary Shelley. But in 2012 during a short stay
at Indiana University at Bloomington I began to think about my Roman-
tic project seriously. I knew already that the younger generations of Ro-
manticists would hardly be interested in any findings linking the British,
or other European Romantic writers and poets to the Arab East. In the
few sessions organized by English romanticists at the Comparative Liter-
ature Association Conference at Brown University in 2012, one only has
to look at the titles of the papers presented in order to reach Kipling’s
conclusion: “East is East and West is West/ and the twain can never
meet!” And if the East is ever mentioned it is done as a lip service, with
hardly any substance.
In Bloomington, Indiana, the ghosts of two dead professors haunted
me at night: Professor D. P. Varma, “a scholar of English Gothic tales and
a connoisseur of vampire lore” as described in an obituary on Thursday,
October 27, 1994, in the New York Times, and Professor Muhsin Mahdi,
the professor of Arabic at Harvard from 1969 to 1996, and a specialist on
One Thousand and One Nights.
I knew Varma since I was a university student at Damascus Univer-
sity. He cast me as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello in 1960, and was
familiar with my poems and short stories. President Nasser, and his vice-
president Sadat attended the performance at the time. But after the disso-
lution of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) in September 1961,
the Syrian military authorities expelled Professor Varma for his associa-
tion with Nasser during the production of Othello. In 1965 Varma, who
was teaching at Dalhousie University in Canada at the time, got me a
scholarship in his university to work on my master’s degree in English
literature. Although he was my mentor and friend I was never interested
in his Gothic field. He knew that and respected my wishes. But he always
wished that one day I would work on the influence of One Thousand and
One Nights on English literature. He was only seventy-one when he had a
stroke and died in New York City. Wolfgang Saxon wrote in the New
York Times that Varma was at the time on a lecture tour in the United
States. Shortly before his death he talked to me on the telephone across
continents and was quite hopeful of the future. A professor of Gothic
romance literature and a person who was fascinated by Dracula and the
supernatural no wonder why he loved the Arabian Nights and saw its
imprints everywhere! But did he realize, too, that one could not be hope-
ful about anything in life? That our choices are very limited, and that
destiny looms large over our heads? Countless characters in the Nights
warn us about the puzzle of life. No one knows where one lives, or where
one dies. Varma, who “was born in Darbhanga, India, a Himalayan vil-
xiv
Preface
lage with a view of Mount Everest,” studied in Colonial Britain, taught
English literature in India, Nepal, Syria, Egypt, and Canada, and died
alone in New York City!
Of all his books that he sent me across continents, I still have only one:
The Transient Gleam: A Bouquet of Beckford’s Poesy, in which he collected
some forgotten poems by William Beckford (1760-1844). I wonder why
did this book survive in my small library now? Thousands of other books
that I owned in the past were either donated to a local library, or simply
thrown in recycling bins. I don’t remember choosing specific books to be
stored, or others to be trashed. I was facing a tragic situation and had to
get rid of everything I owned in a hurry. Inside the cover Professor Var-
ma wrote in September 1991: “For Samar Attar,—the poet who will
understand and admire this work of another poet and novelist—in fond
memory of her own unique manifesto on Beckford long years ago at
Dalhousie.” I was truly stunned. What manifesto was he talking about? I
don’t remember reading Vathek although I took courses from Varma on
the Gothic novels. But I do remember that he asked me years ago to give
a paper
on Beckford at some international congress on Enlightenment in
Bristol, England, and I declined the invitation. Yet after decades I come
back to the Gothic novels, the Arabian Nights, and the English Romantic
poets, something that I never thought would ever happen! It felt strange
to look again at The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, Varma’s friend, and
to read about characters I never wished to hear about anymore. What
triggered my new interest now? Was it a book by a senior scholar who
wrote on something else, used slightly some of my findings on the influ-
ence of Ibn Tufayl on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writers
without referring to my book? Or was it the ghost of my dead professor
who kept appearing to me in dreams, urging me to write on the influence
of the Arabian Nights and other sources on the Romantic poets? I can
never be sure.
As for Muhsin Mahdi, I met him at Harvard in 1994-1995 when I was a
Visiting Research Scholar at the university. He became genuinely inter-
ested in me when I published my paper on Shahrazad and the Box Wom-
an in the One Thousand and One Nights. We talked about it among other
things over lunch on April 7, 1995, in the Faculty Club and laughed a
great deal. But to my shock, Mahdi was no more a person in April 2005
when I gave my paper on Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner and the Arabian
Nights” at Harvard. He was in a wheelchair not aware of the presence of
anyone around him. At a dinner reception made in his honor, he was not
the same Muhsin I talked to in the past. He too, just like Varma, was born
in a distant country, in Karbala', the city of tears and mourning in Iraq.
He moved from country to country. Then he settled in Massachusetts,
only to die there on July 9, 2007, without realizing where he was. That
evening I cried for hours in my Harvard apartment, thinking that the
man who edited the Arabian Nights and wrote about it was transformed
Preface
xv
into a thing, just like many characters in those horrific tales. He did not
recognize me, or recognize anyone else. He was not able to speak, or see,
or understand what was going on around him. Or was he perhaps able,