Taking their cue from self-mockery such as this, critics wanting to debunk the romantic image of the poet who gave his life for the Greek revolution of 1824 have often portrayed Byron as a selfpromoting purveyor of fashionable Orientalist fantasy, who cynically stuck to the East as ‘the only poetical policy’. Of course, Byron's self-conscious deconstruction of his own Romantic Orientalism prefigured modern scepticism like Edward Said's famous definition of Orientalism as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ operating as a Western style for ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. But as Byron also consistently denounced imperialism throughout his verse, he has proved a trickier writer to fit into the binary model of Said's thesis than government polemicists like Byron's bête noire, Robert Southey. The Poet Laureate expressed a low opinion of both western Orientalists and the Indian and the middle-eastern literature which they studied in notes to his verse romances on the Eastern mythology and stylistic motifs he had utilized. The Utilitarians of the next generation would go much further.