SOURCE: Sharafuddin, Mohammed. “Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh and the Politics of Irony.” In Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient, pp. 134-213. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1994,

In the following essay, Sharafuddin argues that Moore set Lalla Rookh in the exotic locale of the Orient to conceal the fact that the work is a political allegory, espousing the poet's intense support of political independence for Ireland.

In writing Lalla Rookh, Thomas Moore intended to make his poem a landmark in the oriental tale genre of his time. The success just achieved by such prominent Romantics as Byron and, before him, Beckford, Landor and Southey, prompted Moore's spirit of emulation. He wrote in his Memoirs, ‘I shall now take to my poem, and do something, I hope, that will place me above the vulgar herd of both wordlings and of critics.’¹ But his achievement in Lalla Rookh...