Customer Reviews

Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella: Texts and Contexts

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Has Astrophil and Stella as well as the Apology for Poetry, and contextualizes the Apology well with selections from other classical and renaissance writing about the value of poetry. A good, clean text. Recommended for classes.

When Stephen Gosson attacked poetry in his book The School of Abuse, Sir Philip Sidney correctly saw it as a Puritan assault on imaginative literature. Making matters worse for poets was that Gosson was far from the only voice denouncing the poetic arts. Further, from the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome right up to Sidney's day there was a tendency to view poetry primarily in terms of what it could offer on a teaching and persuasive level. The ability of poetry to delight was secondary to the latter two. Finally, Gosson's comments were typical of those who still remembered Plato's strictures against poetry from The Republic. It was to confront all these anti-poetic dialectics that Sidney wrote A Defense of Poetry.

In order for Sidney to persuade an audience that he saw as much like himself, he had to couch his response in a manner that would resonate with educated Renaissance courtiers. His structure of dividing his essay into the classic divisions of a judicial argument was a brilliant success. His frequent use of classical allusions reinforce his overarching thesis that poetry has a right to exist because it is the only literary medium that can combine the sister arts of history and philosophy into a means that can teach, persuade, and delight. The modern reader must remember that in Sidney's day such familiarity with history, philosophy, Latin, Greek, and rhetoric was a given.

Once Sidney exposes the shortcomings of history and philosophy, he can assert that far from poetry representing a tissue of lies and a false reality, poetry rather is seen as creating an alternate reality, one that emerges from the poet's own imagination, creating that which did not previously exist. Since poetry reveals a fiction of life, it cannot then lie in any meaningful way. It is essential, he notes, that this alternate reality must do more than teach, delight, or persuade. For virtue to be inculcated in the reader, poetry must motivate that reader to actualize the virtue within the poem and incorporate that virtue into his own daily life. It is this claim that poetry must function as an architectonic or science of sciences that renders Sidney as relevant today as in his day.

Sidney does not shy away from the positions of poetry's opponents. Indeed, he even agrees with some of their claims that some poetry is offensive, but he is quick to note that when a poem offends a reader's sensibilities, that offense is a function of the inept poet and not the poem itself. His evidence is cumulative in effect. He directly addresses and disposes of the charges of Gosson and others of his ilk that poetry is inherently insignificant, emasculating, untrue, and salacious.

Sidney does more than merely defend the right of poetry to exist; he also lashes out at other literary mediums that he himself felt offended by. For example, he was a strong believer in the classical unities of action, time, and space, and literature that violated these precepts such as tragic-comedy, he opposed. He further outlined his distaste for comedy whose purpose was only to provoke laughter based on what he saw as the crudities of farce that were then so popular. Comedy, he urged, ought to be based on a gentler and lighter view of the human condition. Sidney also roundly criticized sonneteers that were overly fond of poetic excesses like Euphuisms, annoying alliteration, and incongruous tropes. It becomes clear that Sidney is a product of a culture that dictates that nature and decorum are the ultimate arbiters of what passes for suitable literature and what does not. In A Defense of Poetry, Sidney was one of the first writers to suggest that poetry is a noble human invention precisely because a well-written poem can make the reader a better person for the reading of it. In one of history's strange ironies, Sidney rescued Stephen Gosson from a well-deserved place in the dustbin of history by defending what was to Gosson as quite indefensible.

I received this book a little late, but that was partly my fault because of my order date, but it was an overall good product that I am happy with!