In all cultures and times, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands.An island is either a destination, or a home, or a place of exile and imprisonment, or simply a place to sojourn.It is an ideal vehicle for journeys treated as allegories, or for acts of finding that turn into acts of losing, or the reverse transformation.An island is not a continent; yet it can be an archipelago.An island is both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name.It can give relief, and pleasure; or it can frustrate, isolate, and negate.Above all, it both invites and resists - or contains or constrains - the imagination.Poetry and Islands explores how islands become repositories of human longings and desires, a locus for some of our deepest fears and fantasies.It balances historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets in English, and in translations into English.The study of particular poems in which islands figure in exemplary ways is balanced by a more detailed discussion of the poets who have played a major role in shaping human responses to islands on a global scale.