We study the reception of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga's sixteenth-century epic poem La Araucana in England during the transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a context in which the consolidation of British imperial power was one of the main concerns of the Romantic writers and intellectuals of more radical thought. After describing the circumstances in which the poem was introduced into the British ambit, we focus on two works: William Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), whose 'romanticized' reading of La Araucana made the poem widely popular and determined its subsequent reception among the English; and Robert Southey's Madoc (whose first versions disseminated around the 1790s), a work in which the English writer poetically elaborated and problematized his reflections on British colonialism, and to whom Ercilla's poem became an anti-imperialistic epic model.