Michael Drayton’s Topographies: Ideas Mirrour (1594) and Poly-Olbion (1612–1622)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Michael Drayton’s interest in the history and geography of England and Wales marks the evolution of his poetic career before the publication of his major work, Poly-Olbion (1612–1622). This article analyses the relation between Drayton’s chorography and his first sonnet sequence, Ideas Mirrour (1594). In his 1590 poems, Drayton links the portrait of his beloved to that of his native landscape. The topographical sonnets that place Idea in the river Anker forestall the descriptions of counties and rivers found in Poly-Olbion. The connections between these two works must be seen in reciprocal terms: while Ideas Mirrour prefigures the chorographic mode in the lyric style, Poly-Olbion looks back into the sonnets’ lyric perspective by eroticizing its rivers-nymphs and by placing Idea near the shores of the Anker, as Drayton had done in his earliest texts.