Introduction: visions of Britain

This introductory essay situates Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), Michael Drayton's vast chorographical and historical poem of England and Wales, in terms of its development as a poetic project, its structural choices, and its reception by early readers. It sets the tension in the text between the local and the national against the backdrop of a more fundamental seventeenth-century shift from national to regional description. By exploring the text's depiction of the ancient Picts, it also considers some of the difficulties that Drayton might have faced, had he managed to extend his poem north to Scotland.