Defending Poetry: Sir Philip Sidney

Though he spent only a brief period as a courtier of Elizabeth I, Sir Philip certainly cut a dashing figure.  He also dashed off one of the most influential works of literary theory in English.  And he was quite the dab hand at versifying.  Today, we look at Sidney's Defence of Poesie, "Ye Goatherd Gods" from Arcadia, and sonnets from Astrophil and Stella.

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Thank you all for coming.  I hope that you will oblige me by posting a positive review of the show on your preferred podcast platform.  Hit the subscribe button, like all my social media posts, and, if you can spare a dime, send it to me by hitting the support the show button in the upper right corner of the Buzzsprout homepage.  I hope you love today’s show.

The perennial complaint from students with which a literature teacher must deal is the “What do I need this for?” question.  Why do I have to learn this?  When will I ever use this?  How will this help me get a job?  

I hate this question for a couple of reasons, not least of which is the fact that I’ve no very good answer. Really: You don’t need this.  You’ll probably never use it.  It won’t help you get a job.  In fact, your best case scenario is that you’ll end up like me: a rumpled, poorly-dressed public servant with an expanding waistline, receding hairline, and incipient alcoholism.

I used to wax poetic about expanding the mind, about building empathy, about the aesthetic pleasure of language.  When that failed, I urged the utility of clear communication skills, the ability to write, speak ,and think cogently – skills every company desires.  But interest in the humanities continues to decline to crisis proportions and every day one can read a crie de coeur for the death of the English major or the end of history as a discipline. 

But I understand.  Literary study is not necessarily an easy endeavor, and if you are not constitutionally attracted to it, the effort can easily seem misspent.  Additionally, if you are a taxpayer, you probably want to see some concrete return on investment for your education tax dollars.

All this I accept, but there is still a part of me, deep down inside, that resents the assumption that literature or art has to be useful.  For most modern people, the aesthetic or cultural experience is insufficient – it must do something.  I still think something can be “useless” without being “worthless.”

And so I quibble, perhaps, with today’s writer, Sir Philip Sidney, whose Defence of Poesie is generally regarded as the high point of Elizabethan literary criticism.  Sidney is the quintessential Tudor mondain – dashing, educated, handsome, impeccably dressed.  A courtier, soldier, and diplomat who reified Baldassare Castiglione’s notion of gentlemanly excellence in his The Book of the Courtier, a how-to guide to Renaissance flash:

I have discovered a universal rule which seems to apply more than any other in all human actions or words: namely, to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a rough and dangerous reef, and (to use perhaps a novel word for it) to practise in all things a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.

Sidney’s work – both his poetry and prose – strives to exemplify that deliberate insouciance.  We’ll look at his poetry momentarily, but I’d like first to unpack his Defence of Poesie as it seems to express the deep concern he has about his literary nonchalance.

Sidney composed the defense of poesie in probably 1582, responding to an attack on the perniciousness of poetry written by a lemon-sucking Puritan named Stephen Gosson, who, in a majestic instance of misjudging character, dedicated his The School of Abuse to Sidney.  Gosson’s invective against poetry was of the Platonic sort: in fact, he commends dear old Plato for banning the poet-pestilence from his ideal Republic: 

No marvel though Plato shut them out of his school and banished them quite from his commonwealth as effeminate writers, unprofitable members, and utter enemies to virtue.

Poetry tempts the young away from profitable pursuits, it weakens its readers, and lures the unwary into vice and dissipation.  And it’s all a lie, a fiction, a false presentation of reality.  Same old, same old.  Plug in for poetry any number of artistic diversions and the complaint refreshes itself: novels, plays, radio, movies, television, the internet, social media.  Well, actually, there may be something to that last one – may be a difference in kind rather than of degree, but that’s not my point right now.  The point right now is that art has always attracted lemon-suckers fearing that it will corrupt the youth.  I’m sure there was some po-faced monk who tsk-tsked polyphony when his fellow chanters started weaving melodies together in the 12th century.  And we’ve no shortage today of Contempua X. Smuglys canceling and censoring anything that smacks of fun. So, from here on out, let's accept that Sidney lets “poesie” stand for all written arts.

Philip Sidney wanted nothing to do with Gosson’s grumbling, and so he launches a quite elegant rebuttal.  But in that great spirit of sprezzatura, he delivers his classically formal forensic defense in an easy but cultivated prose.  I suppose because it is a classic apology, it accepts the terms of Gosson’s argument, which is, in effect, that if poetry is to be tolerated, it must do something good.  Please see my earlier quibble, but that’s what Sidney agrees to and sets about battling the prosecution.

Sidney’s primary thesis is that “virtue is the most excellent resting place for all worldly learning to make his end of” and that “I affirm that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue.”  This feels like a bit of an Aristotelian defense against Plato’s (and Gosson’s) attack.  Poetry must lead people to virtuous lives.  But how can it do so when it is but a false reality?

Here, Sidney persists with his Aristotelian tack.  He argues that far from being a false reality, poets create a higher reality – not reality as it merely is, but reality as it could be.  As such, the poet is not a liar or a mere imitator, but a creator.  He says, “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”  He calls poets makers, sort of like the Anglo-Saxons with their “shaper” and William Dunbar with his “makar.”

Sidney then invokes the Book of Genesis and the imago dei, the image of God: “give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature; which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry.”  I think we’ve spoken of the imago dei before – you know, when God says “Make we man to our image and likeness..And God made of nought a man to his image and likeness; God made of nought a man, to the image of God; ” many have decided that it’s the creative spark that is our relation to the Creator, not some idea of him being an anthropoid cloud-lounger.  So, for Sidney, we’d be actualizing our God-given potential by being poets.  Creatio ex nihilo – creation out of nothing.  That’s what poetry is, says Sidney: a second creation. He speaks of the “divine breath” with which the poet brings such creations forth, likening it to the breath of God that made Adam a living soul.  

Time for one of our etymological diversions.  We speak fondly of artistic inspiration – we do, it was one of the things Plato found objectionable – well, the word comes from this idea of “divine breath.”  The Latin inspirare, meaning to blow into, becomes by mid-14th century English to mean, figuratively, “to fill the mind” or “to prompt to do something.”  That Latin word was derived from spiritus – a breath – which came to be spirit meaning both the substance of God and, metaphorically, life itself.  Breath: inspire, expire, respire, spirit.

All this is to say that Sidney makes a rather Renaissance humanist claim that poetry is a work of near-divine creation.  In fact, it surpasses philosophy and history in its power to instruct morally.  Philosophy, say he, is too general and history too particular, but like Goldilocks choosing a candidate for Architectonike – the mistress of all knowledge – poetry is just right as it “coupleth the general notion with the particular example.”

I suppose this is a fair argument.  It certainly has held sway for centuries, though the utilitarian hordes batter at its walls.  Of course, the comprehensiveness of the defense, as well as its taut argumentation and breadth of evidence, belies the indifferent sprezzatura of the ideal courtier-poet.  Let’s have a peep at some of Sidney’s verse-work to see his literary theory in action.

In 1580, Sidney produces the first version of The Arcadia (a book with a rather torturous composition and publication history, including an abandoned revision, which need not detain us here) based upon the 1501 Italian model by humanist Jacopo Sannazaro.  “Arcadia” is a mountainous region in Greece, but comes to mean any idyllic, rustic, pastoral setting – the locus amoenus, the “lovely place.”  In Sidney’s work, two princes, named Pyrocles and Musidorous wander into Arcadia on their way back home to Thrace.  A debate about Pyrocles’ mooning over the picture of the Duke of Arcadia’s daughter culminates in a lovely description of the countryside.  

It’s a complexly constructed piece of work.  Sidney alternates prose and verse in a 5-act comedy structure, sprinkles in that pastoral setting, in the service of a plot full of Alexandrian tropes including mistaken identities, shipwrecks, and pirate abductions.  The full monty there, folks.  There’s little wonder he lost control of this one.

There’s a song in Arcadia called “Ye Goatherd Gods” that’s rather interesting.  It’s a singing competition/dialogue between two young swains in love with Urania, the Greek goddess of astronomy who became the muse of Christian poets.  The two singers take turns by stanza and parallel each others thoughts as the poem progresses.  So, for instance, Strephon, the first singer, begins by calling upon 

Ye goatherd-gods, that love the grassy mountains;

Ye nymphs, which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys;

Ye satyrs, joyed with free and quiet forests

while Klaius begins

O Mercury, forgoer to the evening;

O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains;

O lovely star, entitled of the morning.

After the invocations, both singers make the same request: “Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music.”

So, after they’ve settled the audience comfortably in a suitably bucolic paradise, the poem moves to a somewhat elegiac phase, in which Strephon and Klaius each recall more carefree days in the wild forests, and how now they are “banished now among the monstrous mountains / Of huge despair” and “Heartbroken so that molehills seem high mountains.”  A clever reader might note that not only do these passages seem similar in tone and spirit to the Anglo-Saxon elegies we’ve studied, but they also retain an alliteration that ties Sidney’s poem firmly to its ancestors.  Nice mingling of the classical and the Germanic here.

Anyway, there’s other neat little rococo touches throughout the poem: a bit of synesthesia – that is, the mingling of sense experiences, so Klaius says, “I feel a noisome scent.”  Touch and smell overlapping here.  The dual use of fire literally by Strephon and then figuratively by Klaius.  Tiny little things, but evidence of that carefully cultivated nonchalance so characteristic of Sidney’s best work.

Two other things to point out here:

1. It’s a double sestina.  A few of those will give you quite a headache in the morning.  No.  A sestina is a poem of six six-line stanzas and a triplet and must use the same six words (in specific pattern) at the end of each stanza’s lines.  So there’s 39 lines and six terminal words in a standard sestina.  Sidney goes big, pumping up to 78 lines with the same six words: mountains, valleys, forests, evening, morning, and the other one.  Music.  It’s quite a feat of dictionary acrobatics to get those repetitions to resonate with new and interesting overtones instead of becoming monotonous.
2. While written in our trusty iambic pentameter, the lines often have more than the traditional 10 syllables.  This is called hypercatalexis, if you care and you shouldn’t.  The 11th (or sometimes also a 12th) syllable does not receive a stress, and is what we used to call, in a less enlightened age, a feminine ending.  Happily, we now register how offensive such labelling can be, and we have decided to call it instead a weak ending.  There, that’s better, isn’t it?  Anyway, the effect works well, for that downbeat line ending nicely underscores the plaintive content of the song.

But for me the most interesting part of the text are stanzas 7 and 8.  In these passages, each singer repeats the word “meseems” three times.  The word means, quite obviously, probably, “it seems to me.”  OK, so we’re talking about personal impressions.  So the lads say, 

Strephon:

Meseems I see the high and stately mountains

Transform themselves to low dejected valleys;

Meseems I hear in these ill-changed forests,

The nightingales do learn of owls their music;

Meseems I feel the comfort of the morning

Turned to the mortal serene of an evening.

Klaius:

Meseems I see a filthy cloudy evening

As soon as sun begins to climb the mountains;

Meseems I feel a noisome scent, the morning,

When I do smell the flowers of these valleys;

Meseems I hear, when I do hear sweet music,

The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.

Right, these guys are so depressed and lovelorn that everything beautiful and majestic appears to them ugly and base. I suppose anyone who’s ever had a broken heart can relate.  But what Sidney’s doing here is using a kind of personification the cool kids call the pathetic fallacy – that is, attributing human emotions and behaviors to inanimate objects.  Stately mountains become dejected valleys – stately is merely an adjective, but dejected is an adjective that implies some kind of psychology at work.  “Dejected valleys” is also what the cool kids call a “misplaced epithet” because it’s the speaker who’s dejected, not the valley.  What we’ve got here, and elsewhere in the poem, is two young men almost literally recreating nature in their own image, perceiving a reality through the filter of their own emotional state.  They are poets in all senses of Sidney’s broad definition.

Sidebar: did you catch the line about nightingales learning the owl’s music?  For a fuller examination of that pairing, pour yourself a nice cup of tea, grab a cookie, and listen to episode 8 of the podcast: Avian Agitation on Nicholas of Guildford’s “The Owl and the Nightingale.”

Let’s move one, dear listeners, because I do want to speak on Sidney’s sonnet cycle called Astrophil and Stella from about 1581.  It’s the first full Petrachan style sonnet sequence in English and rather set the vogue for them for the rest of the 16th century.

As Petrarch had his Laura, and Wyatt his Anne, so Sidney has his Penelope Devereaux.  The names of the title: Astrophil, from the Greek meaning “star-lover” (and also perhaps a play on Sidney’s given name: Philip) and Stella, from the Latin for “star” are metafictional projections of Sidney and Devereaux, he being the forlorn lover, forced to pine as his beloved marries another (though rather unhappily, as I understand it, but I’ll spill no tea).

The narrative hinted at by the sequence revolves around Astrophil's infatuation with Stella, an embodiment of beauty and perfection. The sonnets capture Astrophil's intense emotions, his desires, frustrations, and the conflicting aspects of love. Sidney delves into the themes of unattainability, the limitations of language to express true feelings, and the consequences of pursuing forbidden love, while ricocheting from passionate longing to desperate self-doubt. 

Some critics note that the cycle has 108 sonnets, one for each of Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey, and that the whole piece contains 119 poems – that is, one for each month of Odysseus’ journey back to Penelope but one.  Like the names star-lover and star, perhaps Sidney confirms Astrophil’s failure and frustration in these oblique Homeric allusions.

In perhaps another structural echo of Astrophil’s erratic emotions, Sidney feels no need to stick consistently with one sonnet form in the cycle.  While generally Petrachan, he employs some fifteen different rhyming patterns and is quite liberal with development of the sestets, using couplets, tercets, and quatrains at will.

Sonnet 1 introduces us to Astrophil’s plight and we get some rather conventional longing, and sighing, and pining.  He loves “in truth, and fain in verse my love to show.”  He hopes Stella will read his love poetry, know that he loves her, therefore pity him and grant him her grace.  But he then realizes that such “invention” will not do.  

And that’s a cool word in this context.  One, it points to the sonnet’s, and Sidney’s, concern that poetry, especially English poetry, should be original, and less dependent upon the Elizabethan convention of imitation.  Though Astrophil reads through the courtly love poetry of the past, “oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain, But words came halting forth.”  Not until the Muse chastises him, saying “Fool . . . look in thy heart and write!”

Aha!  Remember that “thinking I” thing I keep bringing up?  Here it is again in a statement that could easily be seen as the credo of the Romanticists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Indeed, even now, the general conception of poetry, writing, or indeed any art, really, is the expression of the artist’s psyche.  That is, according to Sidney, true poetry.  

But, sir, he does this in Petrarchan styles through a persona named Astrophil!  Hardly soul-baring in the Romantic idiom, sir.

Yes, I am aware.  But baby steps, yeah?

Oh, and sir.  He writes the first sonnet in alexandrines.

What?

Alexandrines, sir.  12 syllable lines from French poetry. Sidney does shift the accent pattern about to make it fit English better, but it’s French alexandrines all the same, sir.

Yes, uh, well done, enthusiastic and polite pupil.

Thank you, sir.

Where were we?  Ah, yes.  Sonnet 3 begins with some haughty snark: “Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine / that bravely masked, their fancies may be told.”  Basically, let weak minds turn to the muses for their artificial inspiration.  Stella is the true Muse: “in Stella’s face I read / what love and beauty be; then all my deed / but copying is, what, in her, Nature writes.”

This is a rather complicated little shift.  So, the nine muses are artificial and those who rely upon them merely imitative or derivative.  But Stella is the epitome of love and beauty, so Astrophil merely needs to copy what Nature has written.  So Nature is the poet, in the Sidneyan sense, not Astrophil (or Sidney?).  This could be seen to contradict Sideney’s assertion in the Defence that a poet creates a second, perhaps better, Nature.  But only if we fully accept that Sidney and Astrophil are one and the same, and I don’t think it’s hermeneutically safe to do so.  Certainly, Astrophil is a projection, a persona, based on Sidney, but it does not follow that one is exchangeable with the other.  Indeed, if that were so, why bother creating the character?  

But the lines can get a bit muddy, I’ll grant that.  In sonnet 14, Astrophil compares himself to Prometheus, the Titan who defied the Olympian gods to give humankind fire and thus civilization.  Some myths even credit Prometheus with creating humanity – from the mud.  Gods do love to play in the dirt.

At any rate, while Sidney’s allusion is to Proemtheus’ torment for his disobedience – “Alas, have  I not pain enough, my friend, / Upon whose breast a fiercer gripe doth tire / Than did on him who first stole down the fire” – the associations of self-sufficiency, and self-fashioning cannot be overlooked.  But in sonnet 25, Sidney sneers a bit at poets who with “poor Petrarch’s long deceas-ed woes / With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.”  He’s attacking writers who adapt Italian models into English verse.  Hello, pot? Hi, this is kettle . . . 

Well, he’s probably talking about lesser-poets and, if it’s true, you're not arrogant.  

Let’s finish with a look at Sonnet 71 as it seems a fair summation of this episode’s main themes of sprezzatura, originality, and virtue.  Sidney writes, 

Who will in fairest book of nature know

How virtue may best lodg'd in beauty be,

Let him but learn of love to read in thee,

Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show.

Forever and forever in these poems, Astrophil recognizes the vast difference separating him from Stella: she is an apotheosis of true nature, true beauty, true virtue.  She is so far above him that he can neither invent nor imitate his way to her.  It’s a fair metaphor for Sidney’s own literary ambitions: ever inventive and interpretive, densely learned but lightly executed, blase yet earnest.  I don’t think it’s too much to say that although Sir Phillip Sidney is an arch-Elizabethan courtier and poet, he also devised an almost archetypal idea of a poet, like (ironically enough) a Platonic form of “Poet.”  Even in 2023, when we think of a poet, we have two basic ideas: the long-haired fellow in a frilly shirt, head in hand over an escritoire or a bescarfed beatnik: black sunglasses, turtleneck, and beret, a Gauloise cigarette hanging from the lips with a studied indifference.  Both of these can be found in Sidney.

Thanks for listening.  I’ll talk to you soon.