Defence of Poesie by Sir Philip Sidney

First published: 1595

Type of work: Literary criticism

The Work:

Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie is an attempt to raise poetry above the criticism that had been directed at it by contemporary critics and to establish it as the highest of the arts, best fitted both to please and to instruct, the two aims stated by Horace in his Ars poetica (c. 17 b.c.e.). The first part of Defence of Poesie is primarily theoretical; Sidney weighs the respective merits of philosophy, history, and poetry as teachers of virtue. In the final section, he surveys the state of English literature soon after 1580.

The importance of Sidney’s Defence of Poesie can best be appreciated by understanding the political climate of the late sixteenth century. A growing number of religious leaders were condemning the production of imaginative literature; lyric and dramatic works were viewed as little more than tools for corruption. Furthermore, much of the writing being produced in England was hackneyed and trite. Nevertheless, Sidney, a student of the classics and a poet himself, believed there was both aesthetic and moral value in poetry, which he defined broadly to include all imaginative literature. Well versed in Greek and Roman literature, familiar with both classical and Renaissance defenses of the arts, the courtier-artist took it upon himself to champion the practice of writing. The task proved formidable, since no earlier justification seemed to be able to counter the charges that imaginative literature was simply a vile distraction that promoted idleness at best, immorality at worst. Sidney found that the only way to defend the practice of poetry was to redefine its function and assign it a more significant aesthetic role. Modeling his work on both classical and Renaissance predecessors, Sidney constructs in the Defence of Poesie a formal argument, in a style reminiscent of the Roman orator Cicero and his followers in the practice of rhetoric, to explain the value of poetry and to delineate those qualities that make the poet a valuable teacher.

Sidney’s first argument for the supremacy of poetry is that it was the “first light-giver to ignorance”; the first great works of science, philosophy, history, and even law were poems. Both the Italian and English languages were polished and perfected by their poets, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Petrarch on the one hand, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower on the other. Even Plato illuminated his philosophy with myths and dramatic scenes.

Both the Hebrews and the Romans gave high distinction to poets, considering them prophets, messengers of God or the gods. The Greeks called their writers “makers,” creators, who alone could rise above this world to make a golden one. Sidney writes of the poet: “So as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.”

The aim of poetry, of all earthly knowledge, is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” The moral philosopher feels himself the best teacher, for he can define and discuss virtue and vice and their causes; the historian argues that his examples from the past are far more effective instructors than the abstractions of the philosopher. Sidney finds the virtues of both combined in the poet, who can give precept and example. He cites Homer’s demonstration of wisdom personified in Ulysses; of valor, in Achilles; of anger, in Ajax. The poet is free to portray the ideal, while the historian must be faithful to his subjects, and they, being human, mingle faults with their virtues. The poet may show evil punished and good rewarded; the historian must record the vagaries of fortune, which allows the innocent to suffer and the vicious to prosper.

The poet has other advantages over the philosopher; however true the philosopher’s statements may be, they are hard to follow. The poet “doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it.” People will willingly listen to stories of Aeneas or Achilles, unaware of the lessons they are learning. Having established the superiority of poetry to his own satisfaction, Sidney analyzes both the pleasing and the instructive aspects of the various literary genres, trying to determine what faults may have brought poetry into disrepute. The pastoral can arouse sympathy for the wretchedness of the poor or illustrate civil wrongs in fables about sheep and wolves; satire makes one laugh at folly and thus reform. Comedy, which has been disgraced by “naughty play-makers and stage-keepers,” is valuable for the ridicule it casts upon people’s faults, which people scorn as they laugh. Tragedy, stirring up feelings of wonder and pity, “teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.”

Sidney finds nothing to criticize in the work of the lyric poet, who lauds virtuous acts, gives moral precepts, and sometimes praises God, and he defends epic poetry as the greatest of all the genres: “For, as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy.”

Concluding his defense, Sidney takes up the most frequently repeated criticisms of poetry: that it is merely rhyming and versifying; that there are other kinds of knowledge that are worthier of one’s time; that poetry is “the mother of lies”; that it inspires evil lusts; and that Plato banished it from his commonwealth. Against the first objection Sidney reiterates his statement that poetry is not exclusively that which is written in verse, although he defends the use of verse on the grounds that it is a great aid to the memory and that it is “the only fit speech for music.”

The second argument has already been answered; if poetry be the greatest of teachers and inspirations to virtue, it must be worthy of the greatest share of people’s attention. To the contention that poets are liars, Sidney replies that since they never affirm their subjects to be literally true or real, they cannot lie. Although they do not reproduce details of life from specific incidents, neither do they attempt to prove the false true. They call upon the imagination for the “willing suspension of disbelief” and tell not “what is or is not, but what should or should not be.”

Sidney confesses that there is some justice in the condemnation of poetry for its scurrility, but he imputes the fault to bad poets who abuse their art, rather than to poetry itself. He suggests that Plato, in banishing poets from his Republic, was barring those bad writers who corrupted youth with false pictures of the gods, not the art of poetry itself.

Satisfied with these answers, Sidney then turns to the specific problems of literature in England in his own day. He sees no reason for poetry to flourish in Italy, France, and Scotland, and not in his own nation, except the laziness of the poets themselves. They will neither study to acquire ideas nor practice to perfect a style for conveying these ideas. A few English writers and works are, however, worthy of a place in world literature. Sidney praises Chaucer and the lyrics of the Earl of Surrey, and he finds that Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579) “hath much poetry in his eclogues,” although he objects to Spenser’s use of rustic language, on the grounds that neither Theocritus nor Virgil, the most famous classical writers of pastoral, employed it. For the rest of English poetry, Sidney has only scorn, for it seemed to him meaningless: “One verse did but beget another, without ordering at the first what should be at the last; which becomes a confused mass of words, with a tinkling sound of rime, barely accompanied with reason.”

The public criticism of drama seems to him justified, with a very few exceptions. He commends Gorboduc (1561), a melodramatic Seneca-type tragedy by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, for its “stately speeches,” “well-sounding phrases,” and “notable morality,” but he is disturbed by the authors’ failure to observe the unities of time and place. The rest of the tragedies of the age seem absurd in their broad leaps in space and time, spanning continents and decades in two hours. A true Aristotelian in his views on drama, Sidney is convinced that stage action should be confined to one episode; other events may be reported in the dialogue to provide necessary background for the central events. He objects, too, to the presence of scurrilous comic scenes, chiefly designed to evoke loud laughter from the audience, in the tragedies.

Sidney’s last target is the affected artificial diction of lyric poetry, especially of love poetry. He believes that the wildly imaginative conceits of the Euphuists are tedious, and he praises, in contrast, the sense of decorum, of fitting diction and imagery, of the great classical orators.

After a few comments on the relative merits of qualitative and quantitative verse and on types of rhyme, Sidney addresses his readers, promising fame and blessings to those who will appreciate the values of poetry and laying this curse on those who will not: “While you live you live in love, and never get favor, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth, for want of an epitaph.”

Readers familiar with classical conceptions of poetry may find a disturbing dissonance in Defence of Poesie; at times, Sidney seems to speak in theoretical terms borrowed from Plato (who questioned the value of poetry); at other times he seems to focus, as did Aristotle, on the task of defining the elements of imaginative literature and championing poetry’s moral value. In actuality, Sidney is attempting to synthesize the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of poetry and to integrate them with the new neoclassical concept of criticism as a practical endeavor intended to assess the worth of individual works. Like Aristotle, Sidney stresses the importance of the poem as a made object. Significantly, however, he also emphasizes the importance of the imagination in the creation of art; poets rely not simply on what they see around them, but also on that inner quality that gives them the capacity to create people, places, situations, and emotions much like those of the everyday world, but in some ways better or worse, to serve as models for human behavior.

The Defence of Poesie presents principles generally accepted by the critics throughout the Renaissance: The author leans heavily upon the dicta of the most-noted classical critics, Aristotle, Plato, and Horace, and his standards are echoed by the major English critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. The notion that the poet is somehow an agent for good inspired not only the writers of Sidney’s own day, but also those of succeeding generations; the great English Romantics—among them William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats—are the inheritors of Sidney’s belief that poetry has the power of moving people to do good. It is but one small step to move from Sidney’s assertion in Defence of Poesie that the final end of poetry is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection . . . as our degenerate soules” can reach, to Shelley’s pronouncement in his own Defence of Poetry that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Sidney’s essay is one of the most polished and interesting pieces of Elizabethan prose, and his comments on the writing of his own time have been borne out by the judgment of the centuries. Although this work is the first major piece of English literary criticism, it has seldom been surpassed in the centuries since Sidney’s death.

Bibliography

Berry, Edward. The Making of Sir Philip Sidney. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1998. A combination of biography, literary criticism, and social history, in which Berry describes how Sidney created himself as a poet by creating depictions of himself in some of his characters, including the intrusive persona of Defence of Poesie.

Lawry, Jon S. Sidney’s Two Arcadias: Pattern and Proceeding. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. The introduction examines Defence of Poesie as an expression of Sidney’s ideas regarding the heroic poem and the classical idea of the poet. It is seen as a commentary on and preface to Sidney’s Arcadia (1590).

Myrick, Kenneth. Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. 2d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Surveys Sidney’s literary career as a humanist, courtier, and poet; studies Defence of Poesie as a classical oration. Useful notes connect the work to other studies of the text.

Sidney, Sir Philip.“An Apology for Poetry” or “The Defence of Poesy.” Edited by Geoffrey Shepherd. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1967. The introduction analyzes the classical form of Defence of Poesie and its intellectual context and background. Almost a hundred pages of notes add further interpretation and contextual connections.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Defence of Poesy. Edited by Lewis Soens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. A substantial introduction analyzes and interprets Sidney’s text. Further explanation is provided by extensive notes and a bibliography that lists pertinent texts.

Spingarn, J. E. A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. This major study of the history of literary criticism argues that modern criticism began in the sixteenth century. Assigns Sidney a major role in that history and credits him with introducing the principles of classical criticism into England through Defence of Poesie.

Stewart, Alan. Philip Sidney: A Double Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. The title of this biography refers to the fact that the handsome, well-born, and talented Sidney was belittled in England by Elizabeth I, while he was acclaimed for his writing and statesmanship on the Continent.

Stillman, Robert E. Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Argues that Defence of Poesie was influenced by the Philippists, an elite intellectual community associated with Philip Melancthon, one of the leaders of the German Reformation. Demonstrates how Sidney’s education by this continental community led him to dignify fiction-making as a compelling form of public discourse which could promote new concepts of reading, writing, ecumenicalism, and freedom from political tyranny.