Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Britain’s First Antiquarian Epic

Citation

Vine A (2023) Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Britain’s First Antiquarian Epic. In: volume 95. The 95th General Meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan, Yokohama, 20.05.2023-21.05.2023. The English Literary Society of Japan. https://www.elsj.org/meeting/Proceedings/95.html

Abstract
First paragraph: A ‘poet historical’ Michael Drayton (1561–1631) has never been the most fashionable of English poets. Modern literary accounts, if they discuss him at all, tend to represent him as a ‘belated’ writer: as a poet with an essentially Elizabethan worldview, who had the misfortune to live out more than half his adult life after Queen Elizabeth I had died in 1603, and as a writer whose work was defined by a powerful nostalgia for that earlier era. The American scholar Richard Hardin, for example, characterized him as a writer who was ‘as conservative in poetry as he was in politics’, and who ‘continued writing the kinds of verse that had already been out of date in his youth’.

People

Dr Angus Vine

Associate Professor, English Studies