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The present article aims to revisit the familiar trope of English insularity, by pointing to some of its characteristic aspects and probing its heightened ambivalence in the poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In an age of rapid commercial and imperial expansion, of structural conflict with France, but also of growing geological awareness, the coast of Albion became a rich locus of imaginary formation, from the various vignettes of descriptive and sentimental poetry to the more abstract workings of the canonical Romantic lyric. In the following brief survey, I have tried to combine the study of literary motives with the findings of cultural history, from Alain Corbin’s seminal The Lure of the Sea to the recently-emerged “Blue Humanities.”