This volume brings together two early and important studies that go to the very heart of the relationship between western poetics and Arabic poetry. Jaroslav Stetkevych, the author of these studies and an eminent Arabist, shows that at the root of the endeavours of the romantic generation of western Arabists in the 18th and 19th centuries was a definite mission to enrich their own national literatures and to contribute to the creative processes in their own cultures from the artistic and cognitive components of Arabic poetry. Stetkevych shows that this vital literary interaction has been lost along the way of philological historically-based Orientalism, and confronts the question as to why this has happened. English and Arabic text.