SOURCE: “Shelley and the Orient,” in Keats-Shelley Review, No. 6, 1991, pp. 18-36.

In the following essay, Rossington discusses the influence of Orientalism in Shelley's works, focusing on “A Philosophical View of Reform,” “Ozymandias,” “To the Nile,” Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, and “The Witch of Atlas.”

Much informative scholarship has provided us with evidence of the breadth of Shelley's reading of accounts of travels to the Near East, North Africa and India; of the apparent acknowledgement in his poetry of contemporary explanations of Eastern mythologies both by theologians and enlightened philosophes; and finally of ‘the translations of the marvellous tales of Oriental fancy’ which Hogg says Shelley ‘perused with more than ordinary eagerness’ in 1810 at Oxford, and which in the works of Byron, Moore and others he read eagerly afterwards¹. But the criticism and interpretation which deploys such evidence has often seen the eastward geographical trajectory of major poems such as...