The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany

Transcriber's Note : There are many diacritical marks in this text, in addition to Greek, Persian, and Arabic characters. Many common fonts should display these more or less correctly, including Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. Firefox seems to display them better than Internet Explorer.
Unusual characters that may not display correctly, depending on your font or software, include ṛ (r with a dot underneath), ṇ (n with a dot underneath), ḍ (d with a dot underneath), and all of the Persian and Arabic characters. I have cheated somewhat and changed H̱ (H with a line underneath) into H, S̱ into S, s̱ into s, u̱ into u, where the new case uses HTML underlining. The UTF-8 version of this ebook has the diacritical marks if you need them for more serious purposes.
Copyright 1901, Columbia University Press, New York
Manufactured in the United States of America
TO Prof. William H. Carpenter, Ph.D. Prof. Calvin Thomas, A.M. Prof. A.V. Williams Jackson, L.H.D., Ph.D. OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN GRATITUDE
The Oriental movement which manifested itself so strikingly in German literature during the nineteenth century is familiar to every student of that literature. Although the general nature of this movement is pretty clearly understood, no systematic investigation of it, so far as I know, has ever been undertaken. In the following pages an attempt is made to trace the influence which the Indo-Iranian East—the Semitic part is not considered—exerted on German poetry. The work does not claim to be exhaustive in the sense that it gives a list of all the poets that ever came under that influence. Nor does it pretend to be anything like a complete catalogue of the sources whence the poets derived their material. The performance of such a task would have required far more time and space than were at my disposal. A selection was absolutely necessary. It is hoped that the material presented in the case of each poet is sufficient to give a clear idea of the extent to which he was subject to Oriental influence, as well as of the part that he took in the movement under discussion.