Poetry, Place, and Possession in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

This essay considers the complex confluence of poetry and place in Mary Wroth’s The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania in order to explore how the romance’s imperial project is bound up with structures of desire. Throughout the romance, love poetry serves as an impetus to wander, to seek out new places, to step off familiar paths, to travel. It also becomes the occasion to touch things, to carve on things, and to take things—actions through which humans stake a claim to their surrounding environment. Tracing the ways poetry and place intersect in Wroth’s romance, this essay explores two interlocking implications. The first is poetry’s function as a colonial tool, serving the ends of empire in a story that centers (like many early modern romances) on travel, border crossings, and foreign encounters. The second is our understanding of Wroth’s own poetic practice, in which she thought quite deliberately about how and where to place poetry within her prose. Building on critical work attuned to the nuances of Wroth’s relationship to England’s early colonial period, this essay insists that Urania’s imperial project is not only conceptual and rhetorical, but also formal and material. [W.S.]