SOURCE: Brown, Wallace Cable. “Thomas Moore and English Interest in the East.” Studies in Philology, XXXIV, no. 4 (October 1937): 576-88.

In the following essay, Brown offers a detailed examination of Moore's Eastern sources for Lalla Rookh, The Loves of the Angels, and The Epicurean, arguing that although Moore's use of Eastern materials was primarily ornamental, his details and references are based in fact and the result of extensive studies of oriental source materials.

When Byron advised Thomas Moore to “stick to the East” as “the only poetical policy,” both writers were responding to the interest in that region which, popularized by dozens of travel books, flourished in England in the early nineteenth century.¹ Other writers whose works include literary manifestations of this interest in the East are Robert Southey, numerous minor versifiers, and the traveller-novelists Thomas Hope and James Morier.² Like Southey, Moore never visited the East, but like...