Walter Ralegh and the Anthropocene Lyric

This chapter focuses on the lyric poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh and invites reflection on the ways in which poets and their works were entangled within networks crossing the nature and cultures of early modern England. Presenting Ralegh as a test case for the importance of attending to what early modern poets have to say about their lived and worked environment as they perceived and understood it, the chapter reads Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s reply to the Shepherd’, a response to an earlier pastoral poem by Christopher Marlowe, and the fragmentary, apocalyptic ‘The 21th and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’, in light of recent ecocritical interest in the concept of the Anthropocene, ecopoetics, and the new materialisms. In particular, the approach the chapter takes to poetry is grounded in recent thinking concerning the role of the early modern archive in the work of an ecologically engaged literary criticism, and models ways in which the imaginative literature of the early modern period – and the emergent colonial practices, industry, and globalisation that shapes it – can be used as evidence in the pursuit of what William Rueckert has called an ‘ecological poetics’.