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‘as conservative in poetry as he was in politics’, and who ‘continued writing the kinds of verse that had already been out of date in his youth’.