Sir William Jones and Romantic Poetics

The Welsh poet and Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746-1794), whose poems were several times reprinted during the early nineteenth century, was not only the explorer of the family of Indo-European languages and pioneer of comparative religious studies. Fluent in thirteen languages, with a working knowledge of twenty-eight others, and a judge of the High Court at Calcutta, he had first-hand knowledge of Eastern cultures, which informed both his practice of poetry (mostly in translations of Eastern authors) and his Preromantic poetics. In the same vein as (but with much more original knowledge than) Lowth and Herder, who had never lived in the East, Jones insisted on a variety of legitimate “schools” challenging the monopoly of the “one true school” of the Classical Tradition of Greece and Rome. In connection with his preference for oriental passion, emotion, “nature” (in the sense of pristine originality), and sympathy for Aristotelian imitation, he reordered the sister arts, replacing the Horatian “ut pictura poesis” by a Romantic “ut musica poesis”. As a British colonial administrator of Welsh origin, he nevertheless opposed the colonial marginalization of other Western as well as Oriental languages and literatures, thus advancing the cause of Romanticism throughout Europe.