The Poetics and Politics of Bayard Taylor’s The Lands of the Saracen and Poems of the Orient
Abstract
It rained when I got on the plane in Toulouse. A couple of hours, a stop-over and few intermittent glimpses out of the window later, Istanbul finally stretched out underneath me: a panoply of Lego-sized rectangulars and a multitude of pencil-thin lines meandering to form the intricately designed pattern of an embroidered carpet, its broad blue edge sprayed with knotty, wooly-looking white. Flying in along the shores of the Sea of Marmara, I looked down on Istanbul’s buildings, boulevards, and boats. Here and there stalagmitic minarets boldly pointed their tips towards the late summer sun. Still wrapped in the sadness of burying a friend in the Midi and feeling the soft-heartedness that only death and love stirs within us, the sight of the city actually made me smile. Even though flying back to Istanbul had been difficult at times over the past four years, it was not difficult today.
References
- Birus, Hendrik. “Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur. Eine historische Vergegenwärtigung.” Goethezeitportal. 19 Jan 2004. .
- Bredeson, Robert C. “Landscape Description in Nineteenth-Century American Travel Literature.” American Quarterly 20.1 (1968): 86-94.
- Burton, Richard F. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah. New York: Putnam, 1856.
- Corley, Liam. “‘The Veil I Would Not Tear Away’: Rapprochement and Retreat in Bayard Taylor’s Poems of the Orient.” Orient and Orientalisms in US-American Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Sabine Sielke and Christian Kloeckner. Frankfurt, M: Lang, 2009. 59-80.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed. Vol B. Ed. Nina Baym. et. al. New York: Norton, 2003: 1103-34.
- Espey, David. “American Travel Revisited.” American Literary History 17.4 (2005): 808-17.
- Gorra, Michael. “Questions of Travel.” Transition 64 (1994): 53-67.
- Harvey, Bruce A. American Geographies: US National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001.
- Hsu, Hsuan L. “Worlding the Archive.” American Quarterly 55.2 (2003): 295-302.
- Krumpelmann, John T. “Critical Essay.” Bayard Taylor and German Letters. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, 1959. 78-130.