Poetry, peripheries and empire and West through the story of lovers whose paths are shaped by the politics of empire Southey was Landor’s first admirer, and the marks of that admiration are apparent throughout Thalaba (1801), an Arabian romance that paraded its verisimilitude to a specific Orient, vouchsafed by scholarly footnotes to the researches of Volney and Jones Like Landor, Southey was antiimperialist: his hero was a destroyer of superstitious monarchs and priests But Thalaba is also recognizably an Eastern version of a Wordsworthian rustic from the rural peripheries of Britain: born a shepherd in the desert, he is a pure-hearted wanderer, immune to the corruptions of court and city and an austere and self-denying man of God, who upholds spiritual fervor over sensual love As such he is a figure embodying Southey’s moral critique of the commercial, consumerist church and state as much as his distaste for Oriental court culture He is also the first Muslim to feature as the hero of a British epic poem In 1810 Southey renewed his engagement with Orientalism in a still more radical romance, The Curse of Kehama, which, as he stated in the “Preface,” “took up that mythology which Sir William Jones had been the first to introduce into English poetry,” not just to add a dash of local color but also “to construct a story altogether mythological.”14 In developing Jones’s presentation of Hindu myth, Southey aimed to reinvigorate what he regarded as the exhausted Western genre of epic The “moral sublimity” of Indian myth would supply the great theme and lofty subject-matter that eighteenthcentury imitators of “the great poets of antiquity” so clearly lacked.15 By combining an Oriental content with an older Western style, Southey hoped to achieve what his fellow poets had not – an epic for an age in which Britain was in contact with Eastern cultures to a degree never before seen Southey took the epic eastwards and asked readers to see Hindu culture not just as an exotic other, or just as a decorative veneer, or even, as in Jones’s own verse, as a fascinating anticipation of Western tradition More radical than Jones, Southey treated it as a subject-matter, belief system, and poetic style as appropriate for the epic as were Trojan wars to Homer and the biblical fall of man to Milton The Curse of Kehama constituted the apogee of the kind of Orientalism precipitated by Jones – a kind that neither solely appropriated the East and exported it westwards nor simply categorized it according to European knowledge systems, but used it to question the cultural forms that Europeans saw as proof of their superiority By making the epic Hindu (albeit pseudo-Hindu), Southey left it radically altered.16 He had made an imaginative leap beyond British convention and, even if he could not produce an authentic representation of Hindu scripture, the hybrid that he did create demanded that British readers be moved and awed by their likeness to the foreign 187 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008