An Environmental ‘poetics of space’ in Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622)

Abstract

The article examines the mechanism by which space is created and disrupted in Michael Drayton’s chorographic poem, Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622). Gaston Bachelard propounds that ‘Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’: once space is inhabited, it develops the agency to co-create with its inhabitants. Applying this theory of domesticity to Drayton’s representation of water, the article argues that the poem similarly presents the non-human with agency to shape and disrupt space alongside people and their histories. Attending to the spatial agency of the non-human in this way allows for a new ecocritical reading of space in Poly-Olbion, aiming to address what it means to read space in the face of environmental change.