Archipelagic Poetry

Archipelagic literary criticism directs attention to the literary interactions between the ‘four nations’: England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This approach to literary study embraces a plurality of voices and languages across the islands of Britain and Ireland, exploring multi-polar perspectives that de-centre that of England. This chapter begins with a survey of archipelagic criticism, outlining key directions that have been taken and debates opened up. It then charts a course through archipelagic approaches to individual poets—some (such as Marvell and Milton) engulfed in historical events that sucked in all the adjacent islands; others (Philips, Vaughan, Drummond, Melville, Southwell, Shank, Llwyd, and anonymous composers of verse) living and working in different parts of the archipelago, contending with its intertwined and cross-cutting energies. These examples reveal the shifting dynamics of collision and encounter, encompassing political engagement with contemporary events, aesthetic developments in poetic form, and the cross-fertilisation of different language traditions.