Drayton’s ‘Silent Spring’: Poly-Olbion and the Politics of Landscape

Michael Drayton’s engagement with the environment in his chorographical poem Poly-Olbion reflects a desire to connect a literary text to the problems inherent in our complex relationship with nature and anticipates many modern economic, social and political debates on the environment. This paper attempts an ‘ecocritical’ approach to Poly-Olbion, given the poem’s rich hermeneutic potential for the emerging field of ‘green criticism’. Drayton’s idolatry of nature can be seen as part of an imagined archaic economy in a pre-capitalist England, where nature is seen as a ‘symbolic capital’ (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term), rather than as an object for expropriation.