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Summary
Themes
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Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in An Apology for Poetry, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Poetry vs. History and Philosophy
Poetry, Creation, and Imagination
Defending Poetry
Poetry in the Vernacular
Summary
Analysis
Sidney tells the reader that he and Edward Wotton once studied horseback riding with Giovanni Pietro Pugliano at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. Pugliano did not simply teach them about the art of riding horses (how to do it) but invited them to reflect on the activity in a philosophical manner (why one should do it).
Sidney begins his Apology with an anecdote that acts as the exordium, or introduction, to his essay, which is modeled on a classical oration. The anecdote establishes Sidney’s status as an aristocratic gentleman, since horseback riding was a symbol of status. Pugliano’s philosophical approach to teaching riding—dwelling not so much on how as on why one should do it mirrors Sidney’s own approach in the Apology: it will not be a guide to writing poetry, but a philosophical essay about the value of poetry.
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Pugliano argued that soldiers are the most noble of noblemen, and that “no earthly thing bred such wonder to a prince” as skill on horseback. He also praised the nobility of the horse, and spoke so persuasively that Sidney admits that if he was not a “logician,” he might have wished that he could have been a horse. Sidney concludes from this that “self love is better than any gilding.”
Pugliano relates the activity of horseback riding to the aristocratic ideals it embodies. His humorous aside about wanting to be a horse indicates that Sidney does not take Pugliano in total seriousness, and that Sidney understands the slightly ridiculous nature of praising horses and horseback riding. He attributes Pugliano’s high-flying rhetoric with self-love: because Pugliano is proud of himself, he must also be proud of what he teaches.
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Sidney turns to poetry as another example of this phenomenon: how “strong examples and weak arguments” can nonetheless be convincing. He says that he has “slipped into the title of the poet” and so has been provoked to defend his “unelected vocation” because poetry has fallen from its privileged position among the arts to be the “laughing-stock of children.” He jokes that there is danger of “civil war among the Muses.”
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Sidney argues that the critics of poetry are ungrateful. In most cultures, poetry is the means by which the young are educated, the “first nurse” who introduces children to learning.
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The earliest Greek writers (Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod) were poets, and helped to “draw with their charming sweetness the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge.” Archaic poets, like Livius and Ennius in the Latin tradition, inspired people to become more civilized. The same could be said of Dante, Boccace (Boccaccio), and Petrarch, in Italian, and Gower and Chaucer in English, who “encouraged and delighted” later poets “to beautify our mother tongue.”
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In the ancient world, Sidney explains, there was no real distinction between poetry and the other arts: poetry was the language of all learning. The earliest Greek scientists, like Thales, Empedocles, and Parmenides, “sang their philosophy in verses.” The same could be said for moral philosophy (Pythagoras, Phocylides), the art of war (Tyrtaeus), and politics (Solon). Even Plato, who was famous for his critiques of poetry, wrote in a poetic manner: his dialogues are fictions, complete “poetical describing” of circumstance and named symbols (Gyges’s ring, for example). The great historians, such as Herodotus, “either stole or usurped” from poetry their description of human emotions, the details of historical events that they never could have seen themselves, and the orations they never could have heard.
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These great writers would never have become popular, Sidney suggests, if they hadn’t written poetically. As is clear across world cultures (Sidney cites Turkey, Ireland, and Wales), poets are widely respected by the people, however uneducated the general populace may be. Even where there have been attempts to eradicate learning, such as in the conquests of Wales, poetry survives.
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Because most of the examples considered thus far have been Greek and Roman, Sidney now considers what names these ancient cultures gave “this now scorned skill.” At Rome, a poet was referred to by the Latin noun vates, which means a seer or prophet. Sidney takes this as evidence of a great respect for the activity of the poet. He mentions the various cultural practices that linked poetry and prophecy, such as the sortes Virgilianae, whereby one turned to a random line in Virgil and read it as a kind of prophetic statement about one’s life, such as the ancient English king Albinus did. Sidney notes, too, that the English word charm derives from the Latin word carmen, which means “poem” or “song,” and that the prophecies of the oracle at Delphi and the Sibyl were delivered in verse.
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It wasn’t just the Romans who thought of the poet as prophet, Sidney claims. For the prophet David wrote the Psalms—“a divine poem,” Sidney writes—in verse. Sidney notes that not only the form but also the style of the Psalms is poetic, with its metaphors and similes. Although Sidney says that he runs the risk of “profan[ing]” the Psalms by referring to them with the modern word poetry, he suggests that the comparison points to the fact that, if the name be “rightly applied,” it’s clear that poetry “deserveth not to be scourged out of the church of God.”
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Turning to the Greeks, Sidney notes that in Greek a poet is called poietes, which literally means “maker.” (The English word derives from the Greek.) Sidney feels that this is a very good name, because, while all other arts have to do with “the works of nature”—that is, what has been made by God—the poet alone, “disdaining to be tied by any subjection,” uses his “invention” to create a new nature, better than the one in which we live. He is not subject to nature, but rather “goeth hand in hand” with nature, free to invent fictional characters and events. The poet creates a perfect, “golden” world.
The poet also creates perfect people with perfect virtue, creating a paradigmatic lover as Theagenes (in Heliodorus’s ancient novel), an exemplary friend in Pylades (in Euripides’s Orestes), an extraordinary hero in Orlando (in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso), a perfect prince in Cyrus (in Xenophon’s Anabasis), and a most generally excellent man in Aeneas (in Virgil’s Aeneid).
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The virtue of every “artificer,” Sidney writes, consists not in the actual creation of a work of art, but in the “idea, or fore-conceit of the work.” This means that the genius of the poet resides in coming up with the idea of the perfect Cyrus or Aeneas. It is in this capacity of imagination that the poet most resembles God, “the heavenly Maker of that maker,” whose elevation of humankind is nowhere more visible than in humankind’s ability to perfect God’s nature through poetry.
But in order to make the truth of the matter more “palpable,” Sidney now will depart from etymology and go for a precise description of poetry.
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Sidney subdivides the definition he has just offered, claiming that there are three major categories of poetry. The central kind, “CHIEF, both in antiquity and excellency,” is poetry that imitates “the inconceivable excellencies of God.” Namely, David’s poetry in the Psalms, Solomon’s in the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs, Moses and Deborah and Job, and so on. Although they were not Christians, pagan poets like Orpheus and Amphion (both mythical) and Homer did the same.
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The second kind of poetry is philosophical. This includes poetry about moral philosophy, such as the work of Tyrtaeus, Phocylides, and Cato, or about natural philosophy, such as Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, or Virgil’s Georgics. This can also be about astronomy, as in Manilius and Pontanus, or about history, as in Lucan. Those who don’t enjoy these poets, Sidney writes, can only blame themselves for not savoring “the sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge.” This poetry is in some way limited by its subject.
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The third and final category of poetry does not have any such limitation. This is the poetry written by “right poets.” If philosophical poets are like painters who paint the people in front of them, “right poets” are like painters who use their imagination to paint in colors “fittest for the eye to see.” Hence a good painter does not paint the Roman heroine Lucretia, whom the painter never saw, but rather uses Lucretia as the “outward beauty” of the virtue she represents. These “right poets,” like the best painters, create in order to “teach and delight.” They are not limited by what is or has been in the world, as the historian or philosopher might be, but rather enter into “divine consideration of what may be, and should be.” These “right poets” deserve the title of vates, and teach their readers to be virtuous.
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Sidney notes further subdivisions of poetry, naming heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satirical, iambic, elegiac, and pastoral poetry. Although these differ in form and content, most are written in verse. But Sidney makes the important point that verse is merely one way in which poetry can appear, and is not the “cause” of poetry. Indeed, some of the best poets never wrote in verse, such as Xenophon in his descriptions of Cyrus, or Heliodorus in his narration of the love of Theagenes and Chariclea. Poetrs generally do write in verse, however, because they do not write in a “table-talk fashion” and want to exercise care in writing “according to the dignity of the subject.”
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Now that he has specified the kind of poet and poetry he is interested in surveying, Sidney enters into an examination of the activity of the poet in order to secure “a more favourable sentence.”
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The final end of learning, Sidney states, is to make imperfect humans—trapped in “their clay lodgings,” or bodies—as good as possible. Some have thought that this tendency toward virtue could best be cultivated through astronomy and natural philosophy, others through music and mathematics, but all of these revealed themselves to be imperfect, since study of these subjects does not compel one to be virtuous. They are mere “serving sciences”—means to the end of some kind of immediate knowledge that only indirectly relates to the ultimate end of “the mistress knowledge,” the Greek sophia, which Sidney suggests is ultimately self-knowledge. Hence the saddle-maker makes a saddle in order to facilitate horsemanship; the horseman seeks to ride well in order to participate in some ideal of “soldiery,” and so on. The arts that do the most to serve some ultimate, rather than proximate, end deserve to be considered “princes over all the rest.” Sidney feels that poetry is such an art.
Among the primary challengers for the title of prince of the arts is moral philosophy. Sidney imagines moral philosophers confronting him “with a sullen gravity,” speaking to him “sophistically against subtlety” and in general full of moral paradoxes. Sidney describes how philosophers try to use logic to come up with a way of teaching virtue, and try to master the passions “by showing the generalities that contain it, and the specialities [sic] that are derived from it.”
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The historian, on the other hand, “laden with old mouse-eaten records,” is similarly bound by the discourse of history. He knows more about the past than the present. He claims to know more about virtue than the philosopher because, while the philosopher teaches “by certain abstract considerations,” the historian teaches “active” virtue as embodied in historical events such as the battles of Marathon, Pharsalia, Poitiers, and Agincourt. According to this schematization, Sidney explains, the philosopher gives the “precept” and the historian gives the example.
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But it is poetry, Sidney claims, that deserves to be considered the most elevated of the arts. Sidney compares the poet with the historian and the philosopher—he ignores the lawyer who, though concerned with peoples’ manners, is not interested in improving people—and observes that neither philosophy nor history can teach virtue on its own. One gives the moral principle, the other the historical example, but one or the other can not teach virtue independently. The moral principle is too abstract, the historical example not abstract enough.
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The poet, however, can give both abstract principles and compelling moral examples. In fact, the poet can give “a perfect picture” of what the philosopher says should be done. The poet makes an image out of what to the philosopher was merely “wordish description,” which would otherwise “lie dark before the imaginative and judging power.” The “speaking picture of poesy” thus illuminates abstract truths using these compelling examples. Examples from literature, such as Anchises speaking about patriotism as Troy falls, teach readers much more about virtue than the philosopher’s description of it. Sidney lists other examples, and notes how in common language the names of characters or mythical figures have become synonymous with certain emotions or types of people (i.e., Oedipus is synonymous with remorse, Medea with bittersweet revenge).
Sidney concludes that the “feigned image” of poetry does more to teach readers about virtue than the “regular instruction” of philosophy. He cites the most famous example of moral teaching in Western culture, Christ’s preaching in the Gospels, and notes that, while Christ could have advocated the general importance of charity and goodness, he instead spoke in concrete, “instructing” parables. The philosopher may teach but does so “obscurely,” for those who already know enough to understand him or her. The poet, on the other hand, is “the right popular philosopher,” teaching virtue in a way that everyone can understand.
But what of history, which should have a monopoly on compelling examples? Here Sidney once again draws on Aristotle, who wrote in the Poetics that poetry is more philosophical and, in Sidney’s translation, “ingenious” than history because it deals with the universal (katholou) rather than the particular (kathekaston). Of course, it is good to record what actually happened. But poetry isn’t limited by that: the poet can write about what should have happened: of a great hero, such as Cyrus, not as he was, but as he should have been. The “feigned” Cyrus or Aeneas is “more doctrinable” than the true Cyrus or Aeneas, more capable of instructing readers about virtue because he is more clearly an embodiment thereof. Sidney gives other examples before concluding that the historian is limited by “his bare WAS,” whereas the poet can create an example to suit precisely what he or she is trying to communicate.
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Sidney takes pains to emphasize that a “feigned” example—although technically not historically true, or historical at all—is as useful for teaching as a real example. He cites examples from Herodotus, Livy, and Xenophon, all of whom tell fictional stories about noblemen trying to deceive kings, and getting punished for it in the end. These stories will surely be as compelling as factual narratives to one who is considering how to deceive in a similar way, Sidney reasons.
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The poet, then, is indeed prince of the arts, because he can come up with compelling examples about any subject under the sun. Unlike history, which is “captive to the truth of a foolish world,” poetry can present perfect examples in the most compelling and instructive way, eliminating moral ambiguities and contradictions, of which Sidney cites several examples. Indeed, it is possible that, as Caesar said of Sulla, history could do more harm than good to one trying to learn virtue.
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Continuing the metaphor of competition among the arts for the title of prince, Sidney concludes the comparison with history and philosophy by remarking that the poet triumphs by “setting forward” examples and “moving to well-doing” through the compelling way in which he or she does so. Not even the greatest lover of philosophy would say that the philosopher moves a listener or reader more effectively than the poet, and moving is the most important part of teaching. Indeed, it is both its cause and effect, for in order to be taught, one must have a desire to be taught, and good teaching moves one to do what is taught.
Sidney again cites Aristotle, who said that the goal of teaching is not knowledge (gnosis) but action (praxis). The philosopher may show someone the way, and describe the end one strives to reach, but in his or her complex analysis may divert one from the path of virtue. Philosophers think that, once one has mastered the passions enough to concentrate and understand what they teach, “the inward light of each mind” will light the way to virtue. But Sidney claims that actually being moved to act virtuously is another problem altogether, and requires more than just understanding abstract philosophical ideas.
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If philosophy gives one a clear sense of the complexity of an issue, poetry entices one to learn it by giving a “sweet prospect into the way.” It is as if, at the beginning of a journey through a vineyard, the poet gives the reader a cluster of grapes, a taste of the reward at the end. Just as adults teach children to take medicine by hiding it in something sweet, so does poetry hide virtue in the appealing stories of heroes like Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, and Aeneas. If the morals of these tales were told directly to the listener—as philosophy does—they would be rejected. Even things which are inherently repulsive, like suffering or monsters, give readers some kind of pleasure when they read them in a story, as Aristotle noticed. Therefore, poetry is a kind of “medicine of cherries,” giving pleasure while also delivering the medicine of virtue.
Sidney illustrates this with two examples, starting with Menenius Agrippa, a Roman politician who reconciled the people of Rome with the Roman senate by telling a moral allegory about mutiny, in which he compared the state to a body that conspires against its stomach, and ends up starving itself. This story led to the reconciliation of the problem, having “such effect in the people as I never read that only words brought forth.” The second example is of Nathan, a prophet from the Hebrew Bible, whom God sent to bring David, the Psalmist, back to the faith after having abandoned religion. Nathan told David an allegory about a man whose lamb was stolen from him, of which Sidney says that “the application [was] most true, but the discourse itself feigned.” This caused David to reflect on his actions and return to religion.
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From these stories, Sidney says, it’s clear that the poet can “draw the mind” more effectively than the other arts. If the arts and the learning they yield are meant to improve readers in some way, then poetry must be the best of the arts and the poet the best of the artists: “in the most excellent work is the most excellent workman.”
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Sidney now turns from the “works” of poetry—what it can do—to the “parts” of poetry, or its various different kinds. Even if readers find poetry on the whole to be virtuous, Sidney wants to be sure that all of its component parts are examined so as to find anything objectionable. Sidney acknowledges that some kinds of poetry are mixtures of genres (e.g., tragicomic) or of forms (e.g., Boethius’s mixture of poetry and prose), and will not be able to address them all, but if the component genres are found to be good, these mixtures must be good, too.
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Sidney goes through a number of minor genres of poetry that are “misliked” by critics. The first is the pastoral, which some find trivial or petty, but which can actually communicate profound lessons in what seem to be simple fables. The second is the “lamenting elegiac,” which expresses woe or critiques the human tendency to strong feeling. The third is the “bitter, but wholesome iambic,” which openly decries moral corruption. The third is satire, which mocks folly in all sorts of people, including the reader.
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Moving to major genres, Sidney argues that people criticize comedy because bad actors and directors have “made [it] odious.” But Sidney says in response to critics that comedy reflects life as it actually is, and people as they actually are, and—just as in geometry we must see the curved as well as the straight lines, and in mathematics we must count the odd as well as the even numbers—so we must examine the “filthiness” of life as a “foil” for virtue. By seeing imperfect characters on stage, we learn to identify them in life. We don’t learn to behave badly by watching such characters, but rather learn to identify our own faults, which might otherwise remain invisible to us.
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In a similar way, tragedy, through evoking “admiration and commiseration” with its suffering characters, teaches us about the uncertainty in life. It scares the powerful, warning kings about the dangers of tyranny, and is therefore clearly a useful genre.
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Next Sidney turns to lyric poetry, which praises virtue, offers moral precepts, and is often used to praise God. Sidney states that he is frequently moved by lyric, even in the rustic forms he might hear in rural England. He believes that it can give courage, citing the poetry he heard in Hungary, and the historical example of the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) who sang lyrics about valor at home as well as on the battlefield. Pindar, the great Greek lyric poet, may sometimes praise seemingly small athletic victories, but that can be blamed on a broader Greek tendency to put too high a value on athletic competition, rather than on poetry itself.
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The final genre Sidney addresses is heroic verse, whose very name should “daunt all backbiters.” How could anyone criticize poetry that tells of Achilles, Cyrus, and Aeneas, among other great heroes? This kind of poetry teaches the highest and best kind of virtue, and is therefore the best kind of poetry, since it makes the reader most eager to be virtuous. It also gives one the best examples to imitate in life, such as Aeneas, who gives a good model for all aspects of behavior.
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Sidney concludes this tour of the poetic genres, which has shown all of them to be good in some way, by comparing the “poet-whippers” to “some good women” who always feel ill, but don’t know why exactly: these critics don’t like poetry in general, but, if they like virtue, they must like what poetry does to its readers.
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Sidney summarizes his arguments thus far: poetry is the oldest form of human learning, found in every culture and given much respect by the Greeks and the Romans. The poet does not “learn a conceit out a matter,” the way a philosopher does, but “maketh matter for a conceit,” creating a concrete thing in which to express an idea. Furthermore, poetry cannot be evil because it teaches goodness. In this way, the philosopher is a better teacher than the historian, who can never speak of moral absolutes, and surpasses the philosopher in his ability to move his audience. Even the Bible uses poetry in the Psalms, and Christ himself employed parables, which are fictional narratives of a kind.
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Sidney now turns to refuting critiques made of poetry. He begins with the superficial ones. First of all, Sidney notes that “poet-haters” (he uses the Greek term misomousaioi) like to criticize poetry because it gets them attention. Critics of this kind don’t deserve a substantial response, just ridicule. Some writers, like Erasmus in the Praise of Folly, make absurd claims to attract the reader’s attention to an important or non-intuitive argument. But generally critics of poetry are merely fools.
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What many of the poet-haters object to is verse. Sidney has already explained that verse is not an essential quality of poetry. But even if verse was an essential part of poetry, to speak carefully and beautifully must be a good thing. What is more, verse is very useful for memory, which is an important part of learning. Indeed, all of the other arts use verse as a tool for memorization. If verse is the best tool for memory, “the only handle of knowledge,” a reasonable person can’t object to it.
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Now Sidney moves on to address four more substantial critiques of poetry, critiques that cannot be so easily dismissed. The first is that poetry is a waste of time. Sidney objects that this critique “begs the question”: it relies on the principle which is under discussion, namely the value of poetry. If one believes that poetry moves to virtue and is therefore a good thing, then it cannot be a waste of time.
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The second major criticism, deriving ultimately from Plato’s critique of poetry in the Republic, is that poetry is the “mother of lies,” and the poet is a great liar. Sidney responds by claiming that the poet is actually the “least liar” of all writers, since it is in fact impossible for a poet to lie. An astronomer or geometer or physician—natural scientists talking about the real world—inevitably get things wrong. But the poet does not claim to talk about reality, so he or she cannot, by definition, lie: “he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”
Poetry may contain things that are not true, but these are not lies; they are fictions, and whoever doesn’t understand this is being willfully perverse. Whoever thinks that Aesop records true histories should be “chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.” For even a child seeing a play understands that the setting is not real. The narration of a poem or a play is not meant to reflect reality as it really was, but rather “an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention.” Even when a poet uses names that belonged to real people, it is not to make claims about those actual people but rather to signal that the character in question is like those people (for instance, a king, if he is called Cyrus).
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The third major criticism is that poetry corrupts the morals of its audience, inciting lust. Sidney grants that much poetry has to do with love and lust. However, this is not the fault of poetry itself, but rather of the people who write it, and one should not blame poetry for the way certain authors have abused it. Indeed, the power of its “sweet charming force” is actually proof of its power to move its readers—the same power that can move to virtue.
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Medicine can be similarly abused, as can the law, and religious texts, without discrediting those branches of knowledge. If someone uses a sword to kill another person, one does not blame the sword, but the person who used it. Similarly, in claiming that poetry corrupts the sexual morality of its audience, critics are actually endorsing poetry’s power, which in the right hands promotes virtue.
In the same vein, critics say that poetry saps the courage and warlike spirit of a nation, and that the general moral state of England was better before poetry was popular. Sidney rejects the idea that there was ever a time when poetry was not popular in England, and cites several examples of poetry being used to promote courage and military spirit. Sidney cites the example of Alexander the Great, who rejected the teaching of Aristotle in favor of the poetry of Homer. Sidney cites a similar example from Roman history, of the Roman general Fulvius’s love for the archaic Latin poet Ennius.
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The fourth and final criticism that Sidney rebuts is the claim that poetry must be bad because Plato banished it from his ideal city in the Republic. Sidney claims that Plato was in fact the most poetic of the philosophers. He suggests that one of the reasons Plato might have turned against poetry was that philosophers, after having learned much from poetry, tried to discredit it to establish their own dominance.
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Philosophers grew to hate poets because philosophy could not please so well as poetry, and could not capture the affection of the people in the same way, and were even expelled from some communities. It is said that the lyric poets Simonides and Pindar had a positive effect on the tyrant Hiero the First, and helped turn him into a just king, while Plato was made into a slave. Indeed, he invites readers to examine Plato’s ideal city: women were shared among men, in what seems to the modern reader like an immoral social practice.
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Plato doesn’t object to the sexual immortality of poetry, which is what bothers Sidney’s contemporaries, but rather to poetry’s promotion of seemingly heretical ideas about the gods. But these only reflected commonly held beliefs in Greece, and had nothing to do with poetry itself. Therefore, Plato meant to banish poets only because they very effectively promoted ideas that he didn’t like, which means that he actually believed in the power of poetry and thus indirectly praised it when banning poets from his republic.
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Sidney invites his readers to consider that, alongside the criticisms that people have made of poetry, many famous people have also praised it. Aristotle would not have written his Poetics if he thought poetry shouldn’t be written, Sidney reasons. Sidney concludes that we should “plant more laurels” to crown poets with, instead of tolerating the “ill-favoured breath” that some critics want to blow upon the “clear springs of poesy.”
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Sidney decides that, since he has gone on so long, he should consider why there is so little good poetry in England, a country in which the other arts flourish. For many other countries have strong traditions of poetry, like Scotland and France and Italy, and there used to be plenty of good poetry in England, even in times of war. The consequence of this vacuum is that there is a proliferation of bad poetry, giving poetry a bad name. Indeed, most of Sidney’s contemporaries don’t deserve the title of poet, and he claims that he never sought it.
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For poets cannot simply claim the title of poets without the proper skill. A famous old proverb says that poets must be born poets, but Sidney says that even talented young minds must be educated in order to become good poets. The chief instruments of this education are “imitation” of classical authors and “exercise” through practicing different kinds of writing. If students do these activities properly, they will eventually learn to create their own original poetry inspired or influenced by classical authors but not in slavish imitation of them.
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Sidney then offers some comments on famous English poets. He praises Chaucer, who “in that misty time could see so clearly.” He praises the Earl of Surrey, and makes an indirect praise of Spenser by naming his “Shepherds’ Kalendar.” But in general what Sidney offers are criticisms: modern poets try to sound old, and write inelegant verse.
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Dramatists do not observe the classical unities of space and time, and so present ridiculous plots that take place over many months or years and in different countries, which does not seem at all realistic. Furthermore, dramatists stick too closely to historical details, forgetting that a playwright must adapt history to suit the plot and substance of a tragedy. He suggests that they learn from classical tragedy how to make use of the messenger speech to report action that cannot be represented on stage. Finally, modern playwrights too often tell a story from the beginning, when instead they should start at the place best suited for narration.
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In addition to these “gross absurdities,” by which modern authors fail to meet the standards established by classical literature, they mix genres, and abuse them. They mix kings with clowns, creating “mongrel tragicomedy.” Furthermore, they think that comedies must always be funny and provoke laughter. But Sidney points out that laughter is only one kind of delight that comedy provokes, which comes from “disproportion” to the normal human experience and to nature (i.e., deformed creatures and monsters). Sidney advises that comedy shouldn’t just be about matters that provoke laughter, but should also provide the kind of “delightful teaching” that is the end of true poetry. Audiences should not be invited to laugh at things that actually should deserve condemnation, like sins, or pity, like an old beggar. Instead, laughter should be reserved for delightful things, like a ridiculously pedantic schoolmaster. Sidney praises George Buchanan for having matched tone with content in his tragedies.
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Sidney then apologies for spending so much time on drama, but says that he does so because there is relatively little poetry of other kinds in England, except lyric. Modern lyric, too, is poorly written, as modern lyric poets are generally too cold. They need to portray the passions with more energia, a Greek term that means “vigor.”
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Beyond the poor application of particular genres, modern English writers generally confuse fancy-sounding language for eloquence. The problem occurs not just in poetry, but also in the learned discourses of scholars, who “cast sugar and spice upon very dish that is served at the table,” instead of tastefully seasoning their language with fewer classical references and big words. Classical authors might have expressed themselves effectively, but when modern writers imitate them too closely, or cite them too often, it falls flat. Writers also come across as ridiculous or sophistical when they try to use very elaborate comparisons, or similitudes. Classical authors actually used such devices very rarely, and Sidney approves of the less fancy speech of “small-learned courtiers” because it sounds more natural, which is the goal of art.
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After apologizing for straying from poetry to oratory, Sidney considers the fitness of modern languages, and particularly English, for writing poetry. Sometimes people criticize English for having less grammar than Latin, but Sidney sees this as an advantage, because people do not have to study so much to learn how to express themselves effectively in their mother tongue. English is also capable of achieving both “sweetness” and “majesty” in its meter, unlike Italian, Dutch, or French, and also has more possibilities for rhyme than other modern languages.
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Sidney reiterates that poetry has a bad reputation in England because of the bad verse written by “poet-apes,” and not because of any intrinsic fault of poetry itself. He invites his readers to respect poets and poetry as teachers of virtue. Sidney warns his readership that poets are also capable of immortalizing people in their verse, so the names of people who respect poetry will “flourish in the printers’ shops” and shall “dwell upon superlatives” forever. The critics of poetry, on the other hand, will never succeed in their romantic endeavors because they will get poets to write them sonnets to help woo their beloveds, and will not be remembered after their death for want of a compelling and memorable epitaph.
