Katherine Philips

The seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips has predominantly been interpreted as an English poet of royalist sympathies preoccupied with the theme of female friendship in a Platonic coterie context that was reliant on manuscript circulation. This chapter explores these approaches but argues that the poet’s complex biographical and ideological background both expands these accepted interpretations and complicates them in a variety of ways. By looking instead at Philips primarily as an Anglophone Welsh women writer, who also spent a key part of her literary career in Dublin, it is suggested that she shaped her poetic identity within a local bardic as well as an archipelagic context. As such, Philips’ much noted cultivation of poetic friendship and her authorial practices can be seen as directly linked to and thus shaped by the cultural and geographical immediacy of her Welsh and Irish experience.