Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry

Although it stands at or near the beginning of a tradition in English literature that we hear echoes of in later manifestos, such as Shelley's Defense of Poetry, Sidney's Apology for Poetry is not much read these days, nor often quoted, except perhaps the fairly well-known exclamation that the poet "nothing affirms, and therefore never lies." Such neglect, although understandable, is unfortunate. Sidney was writing at the beginning of a tradition both literary and educational, a tradition whose end we are now witnessing, that represents a more or less coherent understanding of the place of poetry (we would say literature) and the liberal arts in western culture.

With our backs against the wall, so to speak, defenders of literature and the other arts in education often fall back on utilitarian arguments. Literature can be a means to improving language skills, theater can improve students understanding of society and hone basic social skills as well. Even so few modern defenders of liberal education would attempt to mount the kind of defense Sidney offers in his Apology. His goals are much more ambitious. Sidney did not think poetry was the only thing; in most important respects he thought it was everything. And that conception of poetry, elaborately presented in the Apology, turned out to be foundational in a number of significant ways. That was not just because it was such a well argued case for the importance of what we would now call literature, although it is a pretty convincing if (to our taste anyway) somewhat overly expansive argument. Nor was it because Sir Philip was nearly everyone's ideal of the perfect English Renaissance knight -- soldier, courtier, scholar, and poet -- although he was by nearly every measure a splendid man. Like many other such foundational documents, Sidney's well crafted defense of poetry came along at just the right moment, and had the enthusiastic backing of all the right people. His eloquent arguments in favor of poetry, which had been circulating among a rather sizable circle of influential friends, were quickly published in competing editions soon after his untimely death (see note at end of essay).

But Sidney was no revolutionary in any modern sense of the word. He was born to the aristocracy, and he benefited from his privileged position and the education that came to him along with that birthright. He went to the best schools with other bright young men from well placed families. At Shrewsbury School he was taught by one of the leading educators of his day, Thomas Ashton. As a boy of 14, he went off to study at Oxford University, along with many other bright youths. As a young man he studied abroad with Hubert Languet, a follower of Philip Melanchthon, the Protestant reformer and successor to Martin Luther. Meanwhile, Sidney's England in the mid sixteenth century was experiencing a cultural revolution that was sweeping across Europe. It was related on the one hand to the Renaissance that had transformed the arts and learning in Italy and other European countries. But it was also in part a result of the Protestant Reformation. Young Philip Sidney came of age at a time when there was a new excitement about books and reading, as well as a growing optimism and wariness about the power of words, made all the more problematic by the rapid spread of printing. Along with many of his friends and contemporaries, Sidney was caught up in the humanist revolution, and his defense of poetry was an expression of his enthusiasm for humanist learning as well as the efficacy of literature. And his enthusiasm was widely shared. Surely it is significant that Ashton, Sidney's master at Shrewsbury, was enjoined during the reign of Elizabeth to prefer among his students not the offspring of the aristocracy but "the godliest, poorest, and best learned."

The greatest English humanist, Thomas More, died a generation before Sidney's birth, and by the time Philip went to Shrewsbury School to study with Ashton, English humanism was nearly in full bloom. Sidney and his life-long friend and school companion, Fulke Greville, imbibed the humanist spirit and became great exponents of the new learning. Of course, that original humanism was nothing like our own amorphous conception of the humanities. And perhaps there is no better embodiment of English Renaissance humanism than Sir Philip Sidney, known to his contemporaries as the perfect soldier and scholar, equally learned in the arts of war and of poetry. He read widely in Latin, less so in Greek, but also knew the vernacular languages, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. He consulted the works of great humanist authors (Erasmus, More, Scaliger, Ascham, Ramus, Bembo) and read the humanist poets (Boccaccio, Tasso, Petrarch, Buchanan). But he was also familiar with the classics (Plutarch, Xenophon, Virgil, Seneca) and the Bible. The humanism that Sidney espoused aimed at an always unattainable earthly perfection of virtue, learning, and action. He studied mathematics and astronomy, botany and medicine, philosophy and theology. But in all of this he strove to mask his diligence with an air of nonchalant gentlemanly elegance and grace, the sprezzatura of Castiglione's ideal courtier. His intellectual reach was as great as Francis Bacon's, although perhaps not so determined and earnest in its application. Sidney cast himself as a man of affairs, a courtier and soldier, but only an amateur scholar.

All of this would appear to distance Sidney from our own world where soldiers are rarely scholars, and scholars rarely men or women of action. But more to the point, how does his Apology for Poetry speak to teachers and students in American classrooms? Like many other writers of manifestos, Sidney could not have known what future ages would make of his arguments. Looking back on sixteenth-century England from our present perspective, just on the circle of men that Sidney knew and that knew him (Walter Raleigh, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser) or expanding it a bit to include others alive in his time (William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne) or recently dead (John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt), we may find it hard to understand why Sidney thought it necessary to defend poetry and to claim, as he does in his opening paragraphs, that it has fallen from the highest of places to become the "laughing stock of children." If it was a laughing stock in Sidney's day, what now among our school children? Even those of us who no longer read poetry must look with envy on an age that could produce such a pantheon of laughing stocks.

But these facts were seen quite differently in Sidney's time. Poetry was indeed well known, but not always so well respected. Philosophy was queen of the liberal arts, and serious writers turned their hands to history. Sidney, however, had a very ambitious vision of what poetry had been and should be. He begins by asserting that poetry was the beginning of knowledge and wisdom in every previous human culture, from the Bible (he mentions not only David's Psalms, but also the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes and Proverbs and the Book of Job) as well as the Greeks and Romans (whose poets were also prophets and priests). Moreover, Sidney remarks that nearly all of ancient learning from the dramatic dialogues of Plato and the histories of Herodotus down to the exploits of pious Aeneas has come down to us in poetic form. We have to recognize, of course, that Sidney is working within a well established rhetorical tradition, and has organized his defense not so much along the lines of a lawyer making his case, although that is certainly part of the tradition, but as an oratorical set piece designed to show off his ability to discover (or invent) all the available arguments on behalf of poetry's superiority, and then to refute every possible attempt to dispute that superiority. This is where many modern readers get lost in the details, and give up both on Sidney and his arguments.

But imbedded in An Apology for Poetry is a fairly revolutionary ideal of education and learning. Sidney argues that by far the best means of learning wisdom is by example, by imitation. And, in fact, imitation is the basis of his entire aesthetic. Poets imitate nature, and base their fictions, their plots, characters, and settings, on natural reality. But, unlike the philosophers and historians, poets can outdo nature by means of their imaginations. Therefore, they give us access to ideals that surpass even what nature can produce. Taken out of context, Sidney's arguments can be misleading and even confusing. What was the regular means of education in Sidney's day? He and his fellow students were given heavy doses of poetry, in grammar school if not also at university. They learned their Latin by learning to read vast amounts of Horace and Virgil and Ovid. [Even a grammar school boy such as young Will Shakespeare, hardly a son of the nobility, learned to read his Latin better than some latter day classics majors.] Latin was still the key to learning in those days, and University was the place to hone one's skills at Latin oratory. The liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium, were familiar to students from late classical antiquity until the eighteenth century. It was a curriculum intended to produce an educated elite who would provide the nation with leaders.

The revolution that began with the Renaissance humanists, however, transformed that education into a system for educating a much more diverse group of scholars. The spread of humanist values, while grounded in the Latin classics, was the work of an emerging corps of vernacular authors, men like Sidney and Montaigne (and even someone like Machiavelli and later Milton) who were interested in employing learning to some greater purpose: freeing men's minds and showing them the way to wisdom, truth, and virtue. The spread of reading and of printed books meant that educated Europeans were beginning to share their views with a wider reading public. Strangely, these views began to transform education from rote memorization to active engagement with authors and ideas. What Sidney claims for poetry, for all literary works, in effect, is this inherent power to educate, in Horace's terms, "to teach and delight."

Sidney thought that poetry would make us more human. It was a revolutionary idea in the sixteenth century. It swept the world and laid the foundations for an educational program that spread throughout the world what we now (sometimes apologetically) refer to as western culture. It was an ambitious program with a fairly amazing ability to absorb and incorporate new ideas, from Sidney's Apology to T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." But it has now been nearly abandoned even by those who might have been its defenders. In that case perhaps it is asking too much that teachers and students have Sidney's enthusiasm for learning, and his faith in the poet's ability to fashion nature and instruct us in wisdom and virtue. Surrounded as we are by a popular culture that astounds us nearly every day with its ability to plumb the depths of popular tastes and appetites, perhaps the notion that literature and the arts can instruct us in wisdom and virtue sounds foolishly naïve.

Note: Sidney died in 1586. In 1595 An Apologie for Poetrie was published by Henry Olney of St. Paul's Churchyard, and a slightly different version, The Defence of Poesie, was printed the same year for William Ponsonby. There were also, no doubt, many manuscript versions in circulation among Sidney's friends. I have relied on a version edited by Geoffrey Shepherd first published in 1965 by Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., and later reprinted in 1973 by Manchester University Press.

© 2005 by Michael L. Hall